The eOneBook is a dedicated manga reader made by Progress Technologies. The company announced that the reader was discontinued on March 31, 2023, but they would offer support on units sold until March 31, 2025. This date is quickly approaching and will be the end of an era.
The eOneBook features two 7.8-inch e-ink screens with 300 PPI. Its primary purpose is reading manga. Two e-paper displays are enclosed in a paper casing, and the device’s side is made of paper, including an actual book spine. The device bends and is easy to hold in your hands, weighing only 530 grams.
When you open the eOneBook, a few buttons are on the left side. Once it turns the page, both E Ink panels are refreshed. There is another button to jump to the next chapter and another to scroll to the next volume. On the right-hand side of the screen is a button to turn the page backward and jump to the previous chapter. The remaining button changes the text on the screen from Japanese to English. This was an impressive feature because there was no delay in switching languages. The buttons are completely flush with the side of the device, which feels like paper. They are capacitive buttons, similar to how the Kindle Voyage strips worked.
Digital content was weird with this unit. Each manga series comes on proprietary memory cards. Around 50 different series were offered only in Japan, but only a handful, such as North Star and Naruto, were available in English. You cannot load your content on the eOneBook, so the store closed years ago, making it an expensive paperweight.
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.