The Pocketbook Era Color is a brand-new e-reader that is available now. This device has the same form factor as the normal Pocketbook Era, except for a Kaleido 3-color e-paper display. What are the major selling points? 3. Audiobook support, built-in speaker, Text-to-Speech function, SMARTlight, IPX8 water protection and physical page-turn buttons. The price is also very respectable, retailing for $259.99 from the Good e-Reader Store.
Hardware
The Pocketbook Era Color features a 7-inch e-paper display with a black and white resolution of 1264×1660 with 300 PPI. The colour resolution is 632×840 with 150 PPI. There are over 4096 colours that can be displayed on the screen, which makes it ideal for viewing e-book cover art, comics, webtoons, or PDF files. SMARTlight ensures the most comfortable reading experience in any lighting, allowing users to select the ideal front light tone, from cold bluish for reading in daylight to warm and calming yellow for reading before sleep. A slider bar can mix and match both the white and amber LED lights.
The 300 PPI and 150 colour PPI will ensure that the fonts are razor-sharp, making the reading experience glorious. A layer of glass protects the screen and is flush with the bezel. The screen features enhanced anti-scratch protection, which gives more confidence in the device’s safety, even in the most active use. Moreover, the waterproof Pocketbook Era is ideal for reading in the bathroom or outdoors. The e-reader is protected from water according to the international standard IPX8, which means the device can be immersed in fresh water to 2 meters for up to 60 minutes without any harmful effects.
In terms of the industrial design, it is very sleek. The colour scheme is all black, and the back of the reader is perforated with over one hundred lines, which provides excellent grip without leaving many fingerprints. Page-turn buttons on the right side of the screen make it easy to hold the e-reader with one hand while turning pages.
Underneath the hood is a quad-core 1.8 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage. The USB-C port allows you to charge the device and transfer data. You can listen to music via the single speaker on the bottom of the reader or pair wireless headphones or earbuds using Bluetooth 5.4. Another helpful feature for those who prefer listening to books is Text-to-Speech, which turns any text into a natural-sounding audio track by voice. With just two clicks, the device will read any text file aloud in one of the 26 available languages. It is powered by a 2500 mAh battery. The dimensions are 134.3 × 155 × 7.8 mm and weighs 235g.
One of the things I like about the Era Color is the manual page turn buttons. The vast majority of Pocketbook e-readers have them at the very bottom, but this e-reader has them on the side, making them more intuitive. This design decision has made the bezels slim and reminds me of the Amazon Kindle Oasis. They have a nice tectonic feel and a satisfying click when pressed down. The home, back, and settings buttons have decreased by around 70%. They are right above and below the page turn buttons. If you are reading a book and hold down on the forward button, it will quickly turn pages. This is a similar experience that the latest generation Kobo e-readers employ and also the Barnes and Noble Nook Glowlight 4. Suppose you are not right-handed and instead are left-handed. In that case, this does have a gyroscope and accelerometer, so you can switch the orientation so the page turn buttons would be on the left-hand side. You can also lock the orientations so it doesn’t automatically switch. You can also use the Era in both landscape and portrait mode.
Software
Pocketbook has always run Linux on all their e-readers, except the Pocketbook Eo, which runs Android. Linux is a popular operating system, and Amazon and Kobo use it for all their ebook readers. This OS helps preserve battery life because no background processes are being run. It is also rock stable and seldom ever crashes.
The main home screen comprises a widget at the top, showcasing the books you are reading or have downloaded from the store and haven’t started yet. If there are a few books you are in the process of reading, there is a multi-page layout, which you can swipe on to see the following few books on the carousel. You will see around nine bestselling titles underneath some recommended books from the Pocketbook Store. The main navigation has icons with text underneath them. They provide shortcuts to your library, audiobook player, store, note taking and apps.
Your library is where all of your content is housed, and you can separate it by formats, author, date and sort by list view or cover art view. If some of your books are missing cover art images because you downloaded them online, a metadata system will look at the book’s title and author and fetch metadata. You will likely be on this screen because you buy and load hundreds of books. You can also hit switches on a particular book to flag it as finished, making it disappear from the home screen.
The Notes section is kind of exciting. It is a dedicated note-taking app that you can use to jot down notes with your finger or use a capacitive stylus. There are six shades of grey, including black and white, which can be used for contrast. You can do multiple pages or delete pages; the files are stored on your e-reader and can be exported as a PDF or PNG. The note-taking system is fundamental, and it pales in comparison to dedicated e-notes, such as the Remarkable 2, Onyx Boox or Supernote. These all have dedicated EMR or WACOM layers, which add pressure sensitivity and a slew of advanced features. PB mainly does this as a service, although the whole note-taking experience is better on their colour e-readers since you can draw in 24 different ones. You can use a capacitive stylus to draw.
The Book Store is something that Pocketbook has been working on for a long time. They have been ironing out deals with publishers to stock bestsellers and books you would like to read, and just not open-source royalty-free books. When you buy a Pocketbook, some titles are only European, or your price might be in Euros. All you need to do is contact the company and give them your serial number; they can change the region where you are based. We always do this with our review units, so it only shows English books and Canadian dollars. There is a starred rating system, a sample download is available, and you can read the description and standard fare. However, Kindle and Kobo have more comprehensive content selections since they both have self-publishing platforms, such as KDP and KWL. They also stock millions of books in different markets all over the world. Pocketbook might have a few thousand, but at least they are working on expanding it. They also introduced an audiobook section, so you don’t have to sideload everything; you can download and listen to them on the audiobook player.
The Apps section mainly comprises all the different Pocketbook apps. Like Send to Pocketbook, Pocketbook Cloud and a few games like Chess. You cannot sideload in your apps; what you see is what you get. This is because Pocketbook is running Linux and not Android.
I like the Pocketbook software. It is straightforward to configure WIFI and add your Adobe Digital Editions account information to sideload in paid files or ebooks you have purchased from other companies, such as Kobo. You can also load library books you downloaded to your PC from Overdrive or Hoopla. Sometimes, it feels sluggish, but only if you expect it to work like an iPad or Kindle Fire and not an e-reader. You must be patient and wait when you click on UI elements or adjust the slider bars for brightness levels. E INK is just fundamentally different, but the little wait times, more make up for the benefits, which are easy on the eyes and long battery life.
E-Reading and ebooks
The Pocketbook Era Color supports a myriad of ebook formats, such as ACSM, CBR, CBZ, CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, EPUB(DRM), FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTM, HTML, MOBI, PDF, PDF (DRM), PRC, RTF, TXT. Pocketbook pays Adobe a monthly fee for the Content Server. This allows users access to Adobe Digital Editions to sideload ebooks in EPUB or PDF purchased from other bookstores. You can also use Digital Editions to load library books borrowed from a company like Overdrive. Pocketbook is very versatile in this regard.
The physical page turn buttons on the side of the screen will likely be how you turn pages. They are the best buttons Pocketbook has ever employed on an e-reader. They can quickly turn buttons, and accidental miss clicks are rare. If you hold down on the page forward or back, you can rapidly turn pages in any direction. This is similar to the system the Kobo Aura One Limited Edition and Kindle Manga Reader used.
The stock ebook reader is what you will use daily to read ebooks since there are no other options. You can tap or gesture to turn the pages of the book. One of the most excellent new software features is the ability to pinch and zoom to change how big you want the fonts to be instead of going to the ebook settings menu. This makes it more intuitive for new users and e-readers. You can also increase the size of the fonts with a slider bar. Around 50 different fonts are pre-loaded, but you can install your own. Of course, like any e-reader, you can adjust the margins and fonts. If you highlight a particular word, you can look it up in the dictionary, on Google, or by making a note. You can make notes with a keyboard or a stylus if you read a DRM-free book.
Reading PDF files will never look as good as on a 13.3-inch e-reader that reads A4 documents natively. However, the 7-inch screen of the Era Color is no slouch either. Pinching and zooming is quicker than the InkPad or InkPad X. Once you let go of pinching and zooming, it takes a couple of seconds for the page resolution to complete. This is because when you pinch and zoom, you engage in an A2 mode, which is supposed to make this process quick. Even in the most extensive PDF file, page turn speed is quick. There are also some additional settings that you can use to customize your PDF viewing experience. When clicking on the settings menu, you can change the orientation, fit width and height, and establish a preset zoom level so every page will automatically have the same zoom level. There is also a page reflow system, which will strip away images and convert everything to text.
One of my favourite settings on the Era Color is the visual setting. You can change the contrast, saturation and brightness. This is useful if you’re reading a scanned document or the text is too light and want to make it darker. The colour screen also makes cover art shine, and when shopping at the books or audiobook store, everything is in colour, too.
Pocketbook is a rare brand with native support for CBR and CBZ, two of the world’s best manga formats. It is easy to find these online or buy from other stores and load them on your PB. You can treat these two formats as file containers that have a bunch of pictures inside of them. The most accessible reference is to think of a ZIP file full of pictures, but you don’t need to unzip the file to view them. It is straightforward to find these CBR/CBZ formats online. However, most big bookstores like Amazon, B&, N or Kobo sell their manga in EPUB files. So, if you buy manga from Kobo or B&, you can sideload them in Era Color since it supports DRM content from EPUB or PDF files.
Wrap Up
The Pocketbook Era colour continues the regular Era, utilizing the same body and overall design. The only compelling new feature is the inclusion of an E INK Kaleido 3 colour e-paper display.
Pocketbook Era Color
$259.99
Pros
- Beautifully crafted
- Waterproof
- Kaleido 3 color e-paper
- Speaker + Bluetooth
- Bookstore with audio and ebooks
Cons
- Glowlight is not bright
- Limiting
- Battery could be better
- Single Speaker is not very loud
- Expensive
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.
