PocketBook: A Retrospective on Almost 20 Years of E-Reader Experiments
Pick up ten different e-readers released in the last fifteen years and nine of them will look like siblings: black bezel, six-inch grey screen, a handful of buttons or none. Then you pick up a PocketBook, and it might swivel. It might run Android. It might, depending on the year, be the only screen in the room actually showing color. PocketBook has spent almost two decades as the e-reader industry’s test kitchen — the place where the odd ideas get cooked first, before anyone knows whether they’ll become standard fare or stay a curiosity nobody else touches again.
The company started in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2007, and moved its headquarters to Lugano, Switzerland in 2012 — a European brand from the start, at a time when the e-reader conversation in most of the English-speaking world began and ended with Amazon. Its first device, the PocketBook 301, went into development in 2008. Its second, released the following year, is the one collectors still bring up: the PocketBook 360°, built around a swivel-hinge screen that rotated for landscape reading. It never became the standard. It also never really stopped being interesting — it’s the kind of device that still shows up in “strangest e-readers ever made” conversations a decade later, because nobody else tried the idea twice.
That’s the pattern, repeated: 2010 and 2011 saw PocketBook push into Android-powered, smartphone-integrated tablets — the IQ 701 among them — chasing a hybrid reader-tablet idea that most of the industry eventually walked away from in favor of dedicated E Ink devices. Then, in 2013, one of the experiments landed first: the Colour Lux, widely credited as the world’s first color E Ink e-reader. By the end of that year the company had sold more than two million e-reader and tablet devices across 35-plus countries — proof the test kitchen wasn’t just tinkering for its own sake.
The 2015–2018 stretch is where the current PocketBook identity really solidifies. The InkPad 3 arrived with SMARTlight, a frontlight that shifts from cool to warm depending on the time of day, years before that became a common feature elsewhere. The InkPad X pushed into genuinely large-format territory with a 10.3-inch screen built for PDFs and technical documents — a niche Kindle and Kobo still barely touch today. PocketBook Digital launched as an end-to-end reading platform around the same period, and by the 2020s the color experiments that began with the Colour Lux had matured into devices like the InkPad Color 3 and the Kaleido-3-equipped InkPad Eo.
None of this means every PocketBook device is worth tracking down secondhand. Some of these were genuinely early, rough drafts of ideas the rest of the industry needed years to get right, and they read that way today — slower screens, clunkier software, batteries that don’t hold what they used to. But the brand’s willingness to ship the swivel screen, the Android tablet, the first color panel, before anyone was sure it would work, is exactly why PocketBook still turns up in conversations Kindle and Kobo don’t: PDF-heavy readers, people who miss the physical page-turn buttons Amazon phased out years ago, anyone curious what a 10.3-inch E Ink screen actually feels like in the hand. If you like knowing why a device looks the way it does, PocketBook’s back catalog is one of the more rewarding ones in this hobby to dig through.
If you’re shopping today rather than reading for the history, the current flagship is the PocketBook Era, and the full lineup lives on our PocketBook hub. Curious about the swivel-screen 360°, the Android-powered IQ 701, or other early oddities specifically? We cover several of them individually elsewhere on the site. And if you’re not sure PocketBook is the right brand for you at all, our e-reader finder quiz will narrow it down in about ninety seconds.
