Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Pages & Pages swaps Cumulus for BeBook Touch

Pages & Pages Booksellers in Sydney has started selling a new ereading device this week.

The BeBook Touch is a dedicated ereader with an eInk screen and wifi access, and is priced at $179.95.

Pages & Pages originally stocked the Cumulus, an Android-based tablet, when the store launched its ReadCloud-powered ebookstore in late 2011, but has since stopped selling the device.

General manager Jon Page told Books+Publishing that he decided to stop selling the Cumulus ‘because Google don’t support the upgrading of Android software like Apple do and it had become obsolete compared to other tablets currently on the market’.

‘We have also found that a lot of our customers wanted a dedicated ereader (despite what you hear from PR companies). We wanted a device that was easy to use that also gave people the opportunity to purchase ebooks on the device. Many of the eInk devices we looked at had to be synced up with a computer, which is not convenient for technology-challenged readers.’

One of the popular features of the BeBook Touch is that it allows customers to set a particular ebookstore as their default bookshop. ‘That was the main reason we went with that device,’ said Page.

BeBook is an Australian owned and operated company. It currently supplies ereaders to a number of bookstores, including several Coop stores, Dymocks stores, Watermark Books and Fishpond. For more information about BeBook click here.

To coincide with the launch of the BeBook Touch in its store, Pages & Pages has also started a ‘Forget Amazon’s Kindle’ campaign. To find out more about the campaign visit the store’s Facebook page here

 

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Category: Local news