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Most e-reader coverage stops at four brands. This section is for everything else — the devices sold in one country, by one shop, for one year, and then quietly discontinued.
Some are genuinely good. Some are curiosities. What they share is that almost nobody has written about them in English, and we own them, so we can.
Why bother with devices nobody sells any more
They are cheap. An obscure e-reader with a working screen costs a fraction of a current Kindle. If you want e-ink and you do not need a bookstore account, the second-hand oddities are the best value in the category.
They explain the present. Every idea in a 2026 e-reader was tried, badly, on cheaper hardware ten years earlier. You cannot really understand why a BOOX works the way it does without seeing what BOOX was doing in 2015.
Nobody else is looking. Search for most of these and you get a dead retailer listing and a forum post from 2016. That is a gap, and gaps are worth filling.
The devices
- AdLibris Letto Frontlight — Sweden’s biggest bookshop sold an e-reader. It was French underneath.
- Alcor Myth LED — a Hungarian device with no store, no account, no ecosystem. Just a screen and your files.
- inkBOOK Classic 2 — a Polish e-reader that won a Red Dot design award and ran Android in 2016.
- Onyx BOOX C67ML Carta Plus — BOOX a decade before the Palma, on hardware that could barely carry the idea.
- Onyx BOOX Poke 5 — the pocketable Android reader, and what it is actually good for.
- PocketBook Aqua 2 — waterproofing, and what that word does and does not cover.
- PocketBook 614W — the plain one. Sometimes plain is the point.
- Tolino Vision 2 — German engineering and a page-turn gimmick nobody remembers.
Articles are added as we photograph and test each unit. If a device above is not yet a link, it is not written yet.
Where these sit against the mainstream
If you are choosing a device to live with rather than collect, start with the best e-readers guide, or the brand pages for Kindle, Kobo, BOOX, PocketBook and Tolino. For something stranger still — the ones that arrived broken — see Weird & Divergent.
Before buying anything second-hand, the used e-reader guide covers what to check first.