Next month Kobo will begin selling the Kobo eReader Touch for $129.99. It’s a new eBook reader with an E Ink display, much like Kobo’s existing offering. The difference is the new model will have a touchscreen, letting you navigate through eBooks with touch navigation rather than a directional pad.
At just under $130, the Kobo eReader Touch will be one of the cheapest touchscreen eBook devices on the market. But if that price is still too steep, Kobo is dropping the price of its original eBook Reader to $99.99. While the new touchscreen model won’t be out until June, the new price on the original Kobo device is effective immediately.
The eReader Touch will have a 6 inch E Ink display WiFi and USB connectivity and support for EPUB and PDF files. The eReader has 1GB of storage for up to 1,000 books, but there’s also a microSD card slot for up to 32GB of additional storage.
The device features 802.11b/g/n WiFi and appears to have a few new tricks up its sleeve including an on-screen keyboard for entering text
The eReader weighs just 0.44 pounds and Kobo will offer blue, purple, silver, and black models.
I’ve never been all that impressed with the original Kobo eBook Reader. The plastic case and thumb navigation button feel cheap compared to other eBook devices I’ve tried, and the page refresh rate is pretty slow. But a $130 touchscreen eBook Reader does sound promising.
It’s an interesting device, and the folks behind Kobo deserve congrats on their nerve and ambition. (clears throat) however, I hav a major bone to pick with them – I find it ludicrous to pay book prices and get something that looks like free verse. The ragged right justification on Kobo ebooks is way more than a quibble, it is a lack of quality and it makes the text harder to read, to boot! End result: I look elsewhere for content.
Different strokes for different folks. I much, much, much prefer ragged-right margins, and am very pleased that Kobo provides this. Also, most typographic studies would dispute your statement that ragged-right text is harder to read; it’s usually considered easier to read, especially on narrow lines, because the eye can more easily keep track of its place in a paragraph (taking visual cues from the ragged margin) and doesn’t have to constantly recalculate the interword spacing (which is fixed for ragged-right text).
I like a lot of people on the Net nice concept and not bad price but I have zero intrest due to the price or selection of books, it just as easy for me to buy on my kindle or get a google book and convert it in mobi format,
now if Kindle could come up with a concept like this for kindle 4 and have the rumored android device more as a entertainment device that has it download store movies, android apps, kindle, mp3 music all on one device to take on ipad than I might be a little more intrested I just can’t see paying for a device from a company that has called chapter 11 and and have a canadian ebook company that can’t get the rights to some of the better american author like apple and amazon has done
This looks WAY better than the original Kobo… Â Too bad I have zero interest in it. Â
I love the concept of an unlocked device that can read ePub and PDF files. Â In practice though, I kind of need to be able to load my Kindel and Barnes and Noble books as well without having to strip the DRM and muck about with them.
Sadly we’re in the world where the technology matters less than the supporting software and marketplace around it, and aside from their own book store, guttenberg, and Borders, I’m not sure anyone else feeds this device, which is increasingly a problem.
Then there’s the whole issue of mono-task devices, for which I guess there’s still a need, but increasingly feels outdated to me.