It looks like most brands of ereaders are going to start getting more expensive in the US in 2025. Pocketbook just raised the prices of several Pocketbook ereaders on their official Amazon store.
The Pocketbook Basic Lux 4, the Pocketbook Era Color, the InkPad Color 3, and the Verse and Verse Pro are all now $10 more expensive than they were previously. The InkPad 4 is $20 more expensive now and the InkPad Lite is $30 more. Their larger models still seem to have the same prices as before, but that could change.
It doesn’t look like the prices of their covers have gone up, but I’ve never paid close enough attention to those to know for certain. But most are reasonably priced in the $25-$30 range.
The worst thing about prices going up like this is they rarely ever go back down again after they’ve gone up, even after tariffs end.
Kobo increased the prices of their ereaders by $10 each last month. Onyx has announced that they’ll be raising their prices in the US as well, but so far they haven’t (prices went up on B&H for a few days but then they went back to normal).
So far B&N hasn’t increased their Nook prices, but their current models are getting older at this point. Amazon hasn’t increased Kindle prices yet either, but being a bigger company they might not have to. They already increased the price of the Kindle Scribe by $30 when they released the new model.
It’s a shame seeing all the smaller ereader companies having to increase prices, while Amazon keeps getting away with charging less for Kindles and making customers pay a $20 premium to get rid of ads to help make up for it. Maybe Amazon will increase the price of ad removal to $30 to stick it to customers even more, but you never know what Amazon is going to do.
TIL that they are still selling the Inkpad Lite!!!
I noticed Boox Go 6 and Page are out of stock at B&H for a week now. Also PocketBook Era seems to be discontinued at Amazon.
I’m guessing they are out of inventory and they are waiting hoping the extra 20% tax goes away before they start importing again. But not clear.
Regarding Amazon they are likely less impacted as they have manufacturing in multiple countries. I wonder what the ratio is nowadays. Also last time with these tariffs, larger companies just shipped some of the components from China to another country for assembly. Likely that loophole is still there.