TopJoy has confirmed with Good e-Reader that they will never ship or fulfill any orders of the TopJoy Butterfly 6-inch or the 7.8-inch models with the DES screens. The company raised over $668,000 on KickStarter, the campaign wrapped up in September of 2022. They claimed to have shipped out hundreds of units, but early backers still have not received anything. The company continues to sell them through their website and through other platforms, but it is unclear if they actually ship out any orders.
TopJoy Butterfly is a full-featured, ultra-portable color e-book reader with 6 and 7.8-inch screen size options. Equipped with a true color DES screen, TopJoy Butterfly offers 300 PPI for black & white content and unparalleled 150 PPI for colon. Powered by the Android 11 operating system, TopJoy Butterfly is a versatile reading pad for different file formats and popular reading apps that make your reading experience effortless. Included with a stylus with eraser, TopJoy Butterfly 7.8 inch e-reader empowers you to read, sketch, and take notes, while enhancing the full-colour paper-like reading and writing experience. Portable, lightweight and compact, it is the BEST GO-TO reading pad for everyday use!
TopJoy has told me that they ran out of money and that no big client wanted to license their hardware, for a white label solution. This is why they have no intention on shipping out the 400 remaining Kickstarter orders and they have been radio silent on the platform for so long. The company has developed a new e-reader with a typical E INK screen, which is called the TopJoy Mini e-Reader.
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.