Weltbild, a well known German publishing house and book seller has announced that they will be selling an extremely cheap ereader to be strongly in place when ereading actually happens in Germany.

In a statement on its website, publisher Weltbild announced that its eBook Reader 3.0, available from Thursday ( 13^th October 2011) online, is just €60 – which puts it firmly among the cheapest ereaders currently available. And well below the cheapest Kindle available outside the USA which is currently what has become known as the Kindle 4, widely touted at $79, but actually costing nearer $ 130 outside the USA.

Weltbild have taken this step as they feel that ereading is the coming thing in Germany, and they want to ensure their place in that market place when it takes off.   Curiously enough, just now, Germans seem to have been happily oblivious of ereading, and are among the least likely people to own an ereader.  But Weltbild is convinced that this will change very soon.

As Weltbild Managing Director Carel Halff puts it:  

“The device is very important for our e-book business and our overall strategy,”

Welbilt, as all you Germans will know, is not simply a publishing house, but also a very active high street book seller and online book seller, and has a very considerable list of ebooks in German that they hope people will choose to read on the eBook ereader 3.0

OK, so what is this ereader actually?

I am sure that it must be yet another Chinese ereader, for that price it can only be one such, but exactly which one I can’t be bothered to hunt down as there are literally hundreds of slightly differing ereaders being churned out from small Chinese factories these days.  Sadly most of them are pretty lousy devices too, prone to battery failure, all manner of software failings, and just about any problem you can imagine occurring to such a device.

Obviously as I have not had one of these in my hands, I can’t say that this particular example of the species will suffer from any or all of the problems I have found to be normal with Chinese ereaders (you should see all the emails I get from frustrated purchasers of sundry cheap Chinese ereaders).

I hope that this one will prove to be the exception rather than conforming to the norm here.

There is a rather pleasing little video on their website, which shows you what this ereader does, and whilst it is reasonably enough, in German, it is perfectly clear for non-German speakers and shows the main points of this device.

Basically they have gone for simplicity, this is a very basic ereader, no WiFi, 3G or touch screens here, simply the basic tools you need to store, read and organise your ebooks.  Lots to be said for this approach in my view.

Would I recommend it to you?

Ummm…  in the light of what I have experienced with a number of similar cheap  ereaders, my first reaction would be to say, nope don’t buy it.   Wait a while, visit any forums where this ereader is discussed and then make your decision.

Anyhow, here are its main specifications:

TrekStor Weltbild eBook-Reader

• 17,7 cm (7“) LCD-colour display
• 5 font sizes
• Works in portrait and landscape mode, with automatic sensor
• Li-Polymer-battery for up to 8 hours reading
• 2 GB internal memory, good for 2.000 eBooks.
  with slot for micro-SD/-SDHC memory card
• MP3-Player-with delivered earphones
• eBookformat: EPUB, PDF, TXT, FB2 with Adobe DRM
• Audioformat: MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA
• Image formats: JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG
• Works with Windows XP, 7, Vista, Mac OS X, Linux Kernel 2.4.
• Incl. USB-cable and stereo earphones

Where can you get it? http://www.weltbild.de/1/ebook/ebook-reader.html#

Price:  59.99 Euros

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