Amazon sells the books, makes the e-readers and certainly has the infrastructure.

So why can I buy a tiny e-reader from XTEINK, but not a tiny Kindle from Amazon?

Is it protecting sales of its existing devices? Is the market too small? Or is Amazon waiting to see whether these little readers have a future?

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BOOX has recently announced three new E-Ink devices, ranging from a phone-sized reader to a full 10.3-inch colour tablet.

They all run Android 16, use upgraded 4-nanometre octa-core processors and include BOOX Super Refresh technology, which the company says should make E-Ink feel faster and more responsive.

Look a little closer, though, and the picture becomes less straightforward. One appears to be a meaningful update, one occupies a slightly strange position in the range, and one may leave existing owners wondering what has actually changed.

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Apple has finally made a folding iPhone and at first glance, the new iPhone Duo looks like it could replace two devices: your standard iPhone and your iPad mini. You carry one device, unfold it when you need more room and leave the small tablet at home.

Except I’m not yet convinced that it is there. In fact, after the most recent Apple event where they launched other products as well as the iPhone Duo, I have ordered the regular iPhone 18 Pro rather than the Pro Max or the Duo, and I think I may have made the more sensible choice.

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Whenever I’m reviewing products over at my YouTube channel, The Spark!, there’s one thing that always leaves me feeling a bit disappointed: opening the box and finding a USB-A-to-USB-C cable.

The product itself might have a nice, modern USB-C port, but the other end of the cable still expects me to use USB-A. And it got me thinking: why are we still using this?

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The basic Kindle has just become nearly 40 per cent more expensive in the United States, and similar list-price increases are appearing in the UK and parts of Europe.

It has not gained a new screen, more storage or any major new features. Amazon has simply increased the US price of the 16GB basic Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99. The Paperwhite has also risen by $40, from $159.99 to $199.99.

Amazon says rising memory and storage costs are responsible. Those costs, in turn, are being pushed upwards partly by the extraordinary amount of hardware required by the AI industry.

As technology companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars building AI infrastructure, are ordinary customers already picking up part of the bill through higher prices on products such as the Kindle?

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If I pick up a book, or open an eBook and see an author’s name on it, I assume that person wrote the entire book.

Sure, they may have used an editor. Hopefully someone proofread it. Maybe the publisher suggested changes. But fundamentally, I have every right to believe the words came from the person whose name is printed on the cover.

But it’s 2026, the world is going crazy over AI, and maybe that expectation just isn’t realistic anymore.

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For years, the route into YouTube’s full Partner Programme has been fairly straightforward: reach 1,000 subscribers and rack up 4,000 hours of public watch time within 12 months. From February next year, that second number is changing rather dramatically.

Instead of needing 4,000 hours of watch time, new creators will need 8,000.

That’s quite a jump, particularly when the existing target can already take smaller channels months, if not years, to reach.

My questions when I first heard this news was: why 8,000? How did they come up with that number? It seems rather arbitrary.

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more I think this might be about something much bigger than simply making creators work harder. I believe YouTube is planning ahead and making some seemingly tough decisions now as it lays new foundations for what the platform is ultimately becoming.

Because increasingly, YouTube isn’t just YouTube.

It’s television.

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Back in May, I wrote about a curious little trend that was beginning to emerge: the rise of tiny E-Ink readers.

XTEINK had launched the X4, a pocket-sized e-reader that looked more like an enthusiast’s gadget than the beginning of a new product category (it had also not long since launched the X3). It was clever, certainly, but I wasn’t quite sure where it would ever be more than a niche within a niche.

A couple of months later, I’m beginning to wonder if I underestimated it.

XTEINK recently announced the X4 Pro, while BOOX has teased us with the announcement of the upcoming Picco tiny e-reader. Two companies arriving at remarkably similar ideas in a very short space of time usually means something interesting is happening.

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The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the reMarkable Paper Pro Move are the two tablets I use when I want to get away from … tablets, such as my iPad.

Both have colour screens, connect to the internet and allow me to read, write, annotate documents and organise my work. They even include artificial intelligence features. Neither is genuinely limited to a single function.

Yet they both feel fundamentally different from the conventional tablet I use. The reason is not simply that they can do fewer things. It is that each device has one clear reason to exist, and almost everything it does supports that purpose.What does this mean for the Kindle?

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Manufacturers will also be expected to provide replacement instructions, make batteries available for several years after a product is discontinued and avoid using software to block compatible replacement batteries.

Not every product falls under the same rules. Smartwatches and fitness trackers, for example, have recently been added to a list of exemptions because of the engineering challenges involved.

But e-readers aren’t on that exemption list.

That immediately raises an interesting question.

What does this mean for the Kindle?

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