Disclosure: we earn a commission if you buy through links on this page.
These are the ones that arrived broken.
Buying and selling used e-readers means a certain number turn up dead. Cracked panel, swollen battery, boot loop, or a device in perfect condition whose bookshop closed down and took the account system with it. Most sellers would bin them. We got curious instead.
This section is not about rare or valuable hardware — that is Rare & Collector E-Readers. It is about devices that are interesting because of how they failed, and about the companies behind them, most of which failed too.
The thread nobody has written about
Three of the devices below were built by the same French company, and none of them says so on the front.
| Badge on the front | Who actually built it | Market |
|---|---|---|
| Nolim | Bookeen | France — Carrefour |
| Letto Frontlight | Bookeen | Sweden — AdLibris |
| Saraiva LEV | Bookeen | Brazil — Saraiva |
| Cybook Odyssey | Bookeen | Bookeen’s own name |
Bookeen descends from Cytale, who shipped a reading device in 2001 — four years before Sony’s Librié and six before the first Kindle. When they could not win on their own brand, they became the quiet engine behind a French hypermarket chain, a Swedish bookshop and a Brazilian bookseller.
There is no proper English-language account of this anywhere. We are writing one.
The devices
- Nolim by Carrefour (model CYBFT1F-CF) — a supermarket sold an e-reader. The model number gives away who built it.
- Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD FrontLight — the chassis all the others are variations on, and Bookeen’s first lit screen.
- PocketBook Pro — a 9.7-inch e-reader with a Wacom stylus, in 2011. A Kindle Scribe twelve years early, on silicon that could not keep up.
- RoverBook Alpha — a plain Russian reader from a Moscow company that no longer exists. No touch, no light, no Wi-Fi, no manufacturer.
- SPC Dickens Light 2.1 — a Spanish high-street e-reader named after a novelist, from a family still running today.
Each article covers what the device was, what went wrong with ours, and whether it is worth reviving. Photographs include the broken state, because that is the evidence.
What this section is really about
A device outlives its manufacturer. That is the recurring lesson here, and it is worth taking seriously before you spend money on anything.
RoverComputers is gone. Carrefour closed the Nolim store. AdLibris moved on. When the company behind a device disappears, so does the firmware, the parts, the account system and any book you bought inside it. The hardware keeps working right up until the moment it does not, and then nothing can be done.
That is a strong argument for open formats and sideloading, and it runs through everything on this site. See library borrowing and e-readers for your own files, or the merely obscure but still functional devices in Miscellaneous E-Readers.