Last month Pocketbook announced they would be releasing a new 7″ Era Lite ereader with a 300ppi black-and-white Carta 1300 E Ink screen, and now it’s available to purchase directly from PocketBook’s Amazon Store.
The price is surprisingly reasonable at $199 with free shipping. That’s only $20 higher than the Libra 2 sold for 5 years ago when it first came out (then Kobo raised the price to $189 in 2023), and the Era Lite is an upgrade over it in some ways.
The shipping date is still pretty far off, but it’s probably just a temporary placeholder; I highly doubt it will take 2 months to ship.
The Pocketbook Era Lite shares the same design as the original Era and Era Color, with physical page buttons on the handle side of the screen (along with power and menu buttons). It does have a lower waterproof rating (IPX4 instead of IPX8) and less storage space (16GB instead of 32GB), but most of the other specs are the same.
It’s one of Pocketbook’s Linux-based models so the hardware is pretty unimpressive. It has a dual-core 1GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM, and unlike some models, it does not have a microSD card slot. It has a USB-C port, a frontlight with adjustable color temperature, a rotation sensor, a cover sensor, and it supports 2.4 GHz WiFi, Bluetooth, and it has a 1700 mAh battery.
On the software side, the Pocketbook Era lite supports all the most common ebook formats, including ebooks with Adobe DRM and LCP DRM. It also comes with a new Libby App for borrowing library ebooks directly on the device. It supports audio files as well, including audiobooks, and it can read ebooks aloud using text-to-speech.
The Pocketbook Era Lite looks like it could be one of the best ereaders released this year, especially for those that still value a crisp black and white screen for reading. I’m going to order one to review so stay tuned if you’re interested in learning more about it. I was really disappointed with the 1st gen Era’s cloudy flush screen, but it looks like they fixed that with an indented screen on this one.
Update: Soon after posting this article the listing changed and it’s showing a higher price from a different seller now, but Pocketbook’s listing will probably come back soon. Make sure the seller is Pocketbook International when ordering from Amazon; that’s their official store and not some iffy 3rd-party seller.
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