Pocketbook has slowly been decreasing the number of e-readers it has been producing to only a few a year. The company has abandoned the North American and Western European markets to focus on Russia and Ukraine. Today, the company has announced a brand new device, the Pocketbook 614.
The Pocketbook 614 is using an E Ink Pearl screen with a resolution of 1024 by 758 pixels. It has a 1 GHz single core processor and 256 MB of RAM. There is 4 GB of internal memory and a SD card to enhance it up to 32 GB. It has a WIFI connection in order to connect up to the Pocketbook open source bookstore. The company has told us that their store does not get a ton of traction and instead they basically rely on Russians inclination to pirate books like there is no tomorrow.
Pocketbook makes pirating eBooks rather easy with their support for a multitude of formats. It will handle CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTML, PDF, PRC, RTF, TCR, and TXT.
There is no word yet on if this is a touchscreen device, but given that there are no manual page turn buttons and a single home button, I would assume it has a touchscreen display. It will be available in the next few months and retail for $119 US.
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.
