Good e-Reader Radio

Welcome to the Good e-Reader Radio Show with Michael Kozlowski and Peter Carotenuto. Once a month, the boys give you a sense of all of the latest news in the audiobook, ebook, e-reader and e-note industry. Today, you will understand why audiobooks and digital books are so expensive and some of the reasons why this has occurred. Audiobooks have always cost more, even going back to cassette and CD days. Engineers, well known voices and billable hours is what drives costs up and audiobook sales are the fastest growing segment in digital publishing for the past five years.

Kobo is going to be announcing a brand new Clara HD 2 sometime in the next few weeks. It will be similar to previous generation, except it will be waterproof, have a USB-C cable and Bluetooth compatibility for listening of audiobooks. It will be the first e-reader that is made of 100% recycled plastic, which will be one of the big marketing messages to customers.

Why has Good e-Reader been reporting on lots of Kindle news lately? People have been sending emails and leaving comments on our news articles and even our new Forum. One of the reasons why, is that it is the most popular e-reader in the world and lots of new readers have been checking out the website and are turning into regular readers. Most of the Kindle news online is either buying guides, or reviews. We try and provide new information or a series of tutorials that are not available anywhere else. Kindle drives views and this is how a niche website like Good e-Reader can continue to pay all of our staff and our growing expenses. Recently we gravitated from a dedicated server to Amazon AWS and EC2, so we are 100% in the cloud now. You might have noticed that our website speed has dramatically increased in the past two months, this why.

Lots of tech blogs have been reviewing our InkNote Color that we designed, in conjunction with Bigme. The ratings are generally 4/5 which is really solid and we are proud.

Good e-Reader Radio is back with Michael and Peter. Today on the show the boys discuss the co-branded color e-reader with Bigme and Good e-Reader. You will get a sense on why Kickstarter was selected as the crowdfunding platform of choice and when it is going to be shipped out. Why did we create it and what went into the hardware and software decisions? Your questions will be answered.

What in the world is happening with E INK Kaleido 3 and Gallery 3 color e-paper? Why hasn't anyone included it in their products yet? The short answer is the panels aren't ready yet for anyone to make a consumer product, they might not only be delayed in 2022, but we might not see anything until summer of 2023. You will also get an idea on the limitations of Gallery 3, such as the various speed modes.

Michael and Peter also talk about their new partnership with HyRead and some of the more interesting e-readers and e-notes that we have reviewed in the past two weeks, it is a riveting show.

Good e-Reader Radio is back with Michael Kozlowski! Today, you will learn why so many e-readers are suddenly embracing English on their devices. Xiaomi just released their first one, Hiread another and now Hanvon?! Are you going to buy a new e-reader in the next couple of months? You will get a sense on what new e-readers have just come out and what ones are worth buying.

Did you grow up reading? What was your first introduction to books? Mine was Star Wars read along records that came with these little books. I think I might have been 3 at the time and started to build word correlation. This built a lifelong passion for reading which continues to this day, even in a world with more distractions. I might have gone overboard in this segment, talking about Hardy Boys novels. Hope you enjoy the non-scripted show!

In this edition of the Good e-Reader Radio Show, your host Michael Kozlowski talks about all of the latest Amazon Kindle News. The lead story focuses on why Kindle for Android from Google Play has dropped support for the purchasing of ebooks in the app. Older Kindle e-readers will also have the store disabled in August, 2022. Send to Kindle, which not a lot of people use, will have support for EPUB books later this year and also cease supporting older formats.

There are going to be more e-readers released in 2022, than any other year in the history of e-readers. I surmise, that over 130 e-readers, smartphones and e-notes with e-paper displays will be released this year. You will get a sense of some of the big ones that have come out already, such as the Nook Glowlight 4e, the upcoming Pocketbook Era, Onyx Boox Note Air 2 Plus and numerous models from Hisense, and this is just in the past two weeks.

Is Onyx Boox ever going to have competition in the e-note space? They are one of the few brands that always release new products, with Google Play and the latest version of Android, they also drop many firmware updates every couple of months. There is one emerging brand, Bigme, that will soon give them a run for their money, however they are a year behind.

Welcome to another riveting edition of the Good e-Reader Radio Show! Today, Peter and Michael discuss all of the latest e-paper news. You will get a sense on what E INK Gallery 3, Kaleido 3 and Spectra 3100 bring to the table. Our main story is how many companies such as Audible, B&N and Amazon are disabling in-app purchases on their Android apps. You will learn all about the new Google billing system and how this will affect the average user. Remarkable has sold over 1 million units and made over a billion dollars in revenue. This is due to one of the best marketing campaigns in the history of e-readers and e-notes. Additionally, do you use a screen protector on your e-reader? They might be hard to find, as many brands no longer make them, since they are low margin items. However, cases seem to be very supported.

Welcome to the Good e-Reader Radio Show! Lots of big brands are starting to abandon the Android platform and stop in-app purchases. This is because Google is now requiring a 30% commission on everything sold in an app and all apps have to use their new billing system. Audible, Barnes and Noble and a few others have already turned their apps into consumption only. Kobo has promised they will continue to sell content, and will be embracing the new billing system. What does the future hold for Kindle for Android? Listen and find out!

There was a record number of e-readers and digital note taking devices that came out in 2021. I have talked to major brands and also smaller companies and the 2021 record will be shattered this year. There should be 75+ new e-paper readers that come out worldwide in 2022. This is super exciting because at least 10+ of these will be using Kaleido Plus and whatever new tech comes after it.

In this edition of the Good e-Reader Radio Show, Peter and Michael take a look at the China situation. A resurgence of COVID has hit the country hard and many companies are struggling to ship out products, since major carriers such as DHL, FEDEX are being delayed. Many brands such as Amazon, Kobo, B&N are experiencing stock shortages and shipping by boat, is not an option.

Onyx Boox has just released the Nova Air Color, a new 7.8 inch 300 PPI reader that has Kaleido Plus e-paper technology. Onyx has made some software optimizations, so this device is lights out. It should be way better than the Nova 3 Color, which came out last year. Will Kobo discontinue the Forma? All of their major distribution partners no longer have it listed on their websites. Kobo also doesn't have it in their marketing materials on their own website and Amazon. Bigme just released one of the highest spec 13.3 inch e-readers in the world, Peter conducted an unboxing and shares his thoughts if you should buy it or not.

Today on the Good e-Reader Radio Show you will learn about the e-reader industries plans for 2022. The show covers Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Bigme, Onyx Boox, Remarkable, Supernote, Bookeen, Tolino, Hisense and many others. You will learn about what readers will have a refresh and what the likely specs are. In order to really understand what new products will be coming out, we first need to go over the big releases of 2021.

One of the big new trends of 2022 will be audiobooks. Kobo launched the Libra, Sage and Elipsa. These all have deadly features, but also have Bluetooth, an audiobook store and support for wireless headphones to listen to them. I believe that Kobo will refresh the Nia and Clara HD with audiobook functionality. This will lay in the groundwork for eventual Overdrive support for loaning out audiobook titles on Kobo branded e-readers sometime in 2022. Barnes and Noble will likely introduce their own audiobook ecosystem on Nook e-readers this year too, in addition to one new device. Amazon will likely refresh the Kindle Basic and Kindle Oasis. Tolino will time their release schedule on what Kobo does, since Kobo handles all their hardware now. Expect a Tolino version of the Sage sometime soon.

Bigme has already released 7 new devices in early 2022, we will be reviewing them all on our YouTube channel and select products on our website. Bookeen will likely release nothing this year. Supernote is in dire straights and I would not be surprised if they went bankrupt sometime this year. They are suffering from production issues with the A5X. Remarkable 2 stock is starting to stabilize, they have outsourced all of their accessories, such as Marker Signature and the stock pen to iReader in China. Pocketbook will likely release 2 or 3 new devices this year, such as the inkpad X2 and a new mini e-reader, in addition to a new color model. Onyx Boox will also release a new color model, likely the Nova 4 Color. Both the Pocketbook and Onyx color models will be using E INK Kaleido 3.

Find out more by listening to the show below. Have any comments on the show? Want anything expanded on? Drop a comment below.

Welcome back to another compelling edition of the Good e-Reader Radio Show. Today, you will learn about the concentrated effort by Chinese e-reader companies to adopt English on their latest generation of products. This includes brands like Xiaomi, Bigme, Huawei and others. You will also learn about why this is happening and who the trailblazers were.

Barnes and Noble is changing their entire audiobooks experience. They have shuttered their dedicated Nook Audiobooks app and the old website. They have fully incorporated audio into the main website, when you search for a book, audiobooks will now be an option. You can listen to them online or with the Nook app for Android and iOS. Today, the bookseller launched an audiobook subscription service. You pay a $14.99 fee and get an audiobook credit, which you can use on over 200,000 titles. You will get a sense on the events that led to this move and small history on why the company is getting so bullish about e-readers, tablets and digital content again.

To close out the show, Michael takes about growing as a person and not being stagnant. The Good e-Reader website has gone through multiple iterations over the years and lately, the company has hired a bunch of new writers, to provide new voices. The YouTube channel is always refining and investing in new things, you watch a video from 3-4 years ago and watch our latest review, and you can see the growth. You have to fail, have to learn and learn from failing. Stagnation is never healthy.

The Good e-Reader Radio Show returns! Michael and Peter will be doing a once a month radio show, on the last Sunday every month! Michael will be doing a solo show, exclusively available on the Good e-Reader website, where you will be kept up to date on the last happening of the E-Reader and E INK industry.

On the show today, Michael and Peter talk about e-paper display screens that have been announced over the years. We talk about Clearink, Plastic Logic, Pixel QI, Bridgestone, Mirasol and many others. How did these technologies originally get developed and what happened to them? Some are still in business today. The only two major e-paper brands that are currently releasing products is DES Slurry and E INK Holdings. These two, invested heavily in research and development and had a good marketing department to entice brands. One of the failures of other e-paper, is that they couldn't manufacture to scale and never did anything, other than the first generation screens.

We also talk about how Chinese companies that used to only release e-readers in China, are now suddenly pivoting and using English on their products. Xiaomi, Bigme and Huawei are notable examples. Will this trend continue?