Amazon unleashed the Kindle in China a few months ago and their fledgling eBook store only has 40,000 titles available in local languages. A new e-Reader called the Tianyibook has just launched for the exact same price as the Paperwhite, but boasts a massive library of over 300,000 titles.
The Tianyibook is also known as the Skytel e-reader, and has a six inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 600×800 pixels. It has 256 MB of RAM and a fairly feeble 600 MHZ processor. This device runs the Google Android operating system, but there is no word on what version it has. One thing we do know, is that it reads a copious amount of formats, which makes it ideal for loading in your own eBooks. It can read EPUB, PDF, PRC, MOBI, PDF, FB2 and a number of others.
This e-Reader is not just a run of the mill device, released by some no-name company. Instead, China Telecom is selling this, which should have it more widely available and have more retail viability than the Kindle. Content is king, and the Tianyibook hopes to target the Chinese market with a store that exclusively deals with Mandarin and Cantonese books.
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.