The Tolino Shine 2 e-Reader was unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair today and seeks to compete against Amazon and Kobo in Germany. The production and marketing of this unit is done in conjunction with Hugendubel, Thalia, Bertelsmann Club, and Deutsche Telekom. These companies are really taking the Amazon threat seriously because last year was the first time they have all banded together to try and make a go out of hardware and digital books.
The Tolino Shine 2 features a six inch e-Ink Regal display screen with a resolution of 1024×758 pixels. This is the same new screen technology found on the new Kobo Aura and Kindle Paperwhite 2. This new hardware seeks to eliminate ghosting and full screen refreshes. Night owls will rejoice as this model will allow you to read in the dark with the built in front-light. You will be able to garner around seven weeks of battery life and store 2,000 ebooks on it with 4 GB of storage. If you need more memory, you can upgrade it via the Micro SD card. It will also be running on the Google Android operating system, much akin to the Sony and Nook brands.
One of the big advantages of this unit is the Dropbox app that comes installed on it. You can upload your eBook collection to your account and then download any of the eBooks or audiobooks right to your reader. It is also now possible to combine the accounts of participating bookstores partners: for example, if a customer has an account with Worldview and Thalia, it can merge its contents into a singular library. Finally, a new firmware update this December will allow for the bulk purchase of collections, instead of one by one.
There is a massive ebook store bundled on the device and can be accessed via WIFI. Over 350,000 titles are available in German and English. There is also 25 GB of cloud storage available to store all of the purchases you make. If you decide to shop elsewhere, you can load in any books you purchase in EPUB or PDF form via Adobe Digital Editions.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.