New Polish ebook reader
By Paul Biba
I received this email from one of our readers and reprint it in full:
Referring to your post on Brazilian ereader, I have a news which might be also interesting for you. In Poland we will have our own e-publishing platform – eClicto. An e-reading device will be part of it. I’m very excited about this project, as it’s gonna support ePub format. That means ePub will finally break into Poland. So far there are only few dozens of Polish language ePub books available on the web.
Please find below a post on this topic:
Three weeks ago I attended a Warsaw Bookcamp, where all the participants were particularly interested in a presentation of eClicto, a Polish e-publishing platform, which is about to be launched in autumn. The business model includes an e-reading device, e-bookstore, news portal and a support centre. Comparison to Kindle is inevitable and obviously everybody gets excited with a device itself. It has 6-inch E Ink Vizplex screen with 4 grey levels, 600×800 px, 166 dpi. Internal 512MB memory can be extended with an SD card by up to 4GB. It will support epub, ecl, pdf and txt files.
One can say, it’s nothing new. Just recently Cool-er and Elonex were introduced to support similar sales models. But for me eClicto is one of first examples of bringing e-publishing from international (English) to national (non-English) level. And it’s not about the equipment this time, its about the content.
The e-reader is a book with blank pages. There are a few models distributed in Poland, including iLiad and Cybook. The only problem is a lack of Polish language books, available in mobile friendly formats like ePub. eClicto is going to change it. They will have to start with hundreds, or hopefully, thousands of books, among them bestsellers, to lure not only tech nerds but also book lovers. This will accelerate, let’s call it “e-quality change” of a national publishing industry, what in longer time will result in e-books being treated equally to p-books by Polish readers.
The price of the e-reader is claimed to be the lowest on the market. No more details were revealed. As soon as I’ll have some news, I’ll share them. Keeping my fingers crossed, it’s gonna be a big thing!
The post is available at: http://www.nizejpodpisany.com/2009/07/04/first-polish-e-reading-device-to-be-launched-in-autumn/
My blog: http://www.nizejpodpisany.com/about
Best regards,
Piotr Kowalczyk (Nick Name)
September 24th, 2009 at 11:29 am
An update: The launch is postponed till December. The price is alredy known – its below $300 for a device with 100 free titles preloaded.
October 10th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
hi piotr,
I have been searching the web for a source of Polish fiction E-Books. Do you have any tips for a good site? They seem non-existant on Empik.
thanks
Iwona
November 10th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Send me an email and i will send you lots of books in polish for sony reader, problem is that my e-reader which i love too bits doesn’t display polish fonts when book is in lrf format. when its a pdf – no issues. Anyone any ideas?
regards,
Ania