txtbeaglr - £10 electronic book

[mahesh2k]

A German firm is hoping to radically change the electronic book market with an ebook that costs just £10 to buy.

'The txtr beagle is designed to do best what eReaders are intended for: reading digital books,' the firm says on its website.

To save costs, the gadget has no connectors, and books are sent to it from a mobile phone app using bluetooth.

More : http://www.dailymail...ook-kill-Kindle.html

[40hz]

How is it that a Bluetooth transmitter is less expensive from a manufacturing standpoint than a simple USB plug? Especially since you'd still need some sort of cable to charge the device. So why not just use USB for power and data?

Call me suspicious, but exclusively using a smartphone to load ebooks into a reader makes no sense - unless they're making some sort of revenue (via user web tracking?) from their phone app. Which is something they'd need to do since 10£ would not come even close to covering the cost of making that device.

Something sounds a little weird to me about this product. There has to be a catch.

[mouser]

Agree with 40hz -- it simply makes no sense to say it was cheaper to support bluetooth instead of usb.
It sounds like maybe they are going to charge for the service of uploading to the device?

Regardless, that's an insanely cheap price and the makers/hackers would have a field day of happiness with it if it really came out at that price.

[40hz]

Regardless, that's an insanely cheap price and the makers/hackers would have a field day of happiness with it if it really came out at that price.

-mouser (October 13, 2012, 11:55 AM)

Agree. It would be worth it just to get your hands on the E-Ink display. (Really nice if it could be made to work with a Raspberry Pi.) There's a few projects I could think of for that - not to mention possibly converting the device itself into a wifi sniffer or related network tech's tool.

[mahesh2k]

I think they just want to earn from the store sales. They have their own ebook store like amazon. Catch is something like this - before chinese brands enter into this market and flood it with similar readers, somebody already started it and is trying to bank on it. Nothing bad if it only lets people read the books. I was thinking Kindle is better because you can backup books online for free upto 4GB on amazon account. I am still not sure except the online backup of book part, none of the other chinese or other EU brands tried to come up with cheap reader like this.