Almost perfect: The PocketBook Verse Pro Colour

A couple of optimisations and this e-reader would be a total gamechanger

I've been looking forward to writing this one as it finally breaks up the sea of Kobo and Android e-reader options. The PocketBook Verse Pro Colour is a 6inch e-reader that right out of the gate I will say is worth consideration.

Stacking it against my requirements it has pretty much everything I'm after:

• IPX8 rating meaning it can sit in the bottom of the bath for half an hour in theory. Not that I'd ever want to test that out myself but who isn't clumsy sometimes?
• 6 inch and perfectly pocket-sized
• You get 5GB cloud storage with your PocketBook Cloud account. It also integrates with Dropbox, and both options let you upload your own e-books with wide e-book format support on the e-reader itself*
• Backlit screen with cool and warm colour settings and automatic adaptive light modes
• Dark mode settings
• Android and iPhone PocketBook mobile apps that sync progress with your PocketBook e-reader
• The mobile apps integrate with OPDS so you can download e-books from your own Calibre-web/Kavita/etc*
• PocketBook have an e-book store integrated with their e-readers and apps*

So far so good! It pretty much has everything I’ve been looking for. It also has some extra things I wasn't looking for, some of which are pretty cool, others feel pretty pointless. So let’s get into the pros and cons.

Snag #1: Don't overload your cloud storage

Your PocketBook account comes with 5GB of storage, more than enough for my entire e-book library of around 300 e-books and comics. However, after I uploaded my whole library there I discovered something really annoying: If you add 300 books to your PocketBook Cloud storage, even though it doesn't auto-download them to your e-reader, your e-reader becomes unusably slow. It gets so unresponsive it's literally impossible to just navigate through the home menu, let alone read on. Something about just browsing through that number of undownloaded books on your cloud brings the Verse Pro Colour to a screeching halt, even causing it to crash and restart. I have no idea why this is. It can load its own store pages just fine without a performance hit, but however it indexes your PocketBook Cloud library is clearly not optimised for mass browsing.

I did implement a work around for this that is perfectly cromulent for me, but I'm so disappointed that it doesn't "just work". Especially as the whole reason the company exists in the first place was to allow people to read their own digital libraries regardless of where their digital books came from. I really hope this is something they fix in the future.

My workaround is that the PocketBook mobile app supports OPDS. This means I can push my library to my Kavita instance, and then browse it easily on my PocketBook mobile app and select books I want to add to my PocketBook Cloud from there. While not as convenient as if the Cloud storage has just worked directly, it still allows me full access to my e-book library with all the other benefits of reading progress sync with the app and everything else.

Snag #2: You can't upload your own audiobooks on PocketBook Cloud

Another way that PocketBook Cloud is a disappointment is that I could not find a way to upload my own audiobooks to it. There is an Audiobook section on the Cloud menu, but it only gives you the option to purchase PocketBook audiobooks, not upload your own. Alongside the way the e-reader performance drastically declines when you try to get the most out of your 5GB of e-book storage, this was another kick of disappointment when it came to the promises of PocketBook cloud. You canget around this somewhat by syncing audiobooks wirelessly via Dropbox, but that option has its own issues.

Snag #3: UK availability

Getting hold of this e-reader is not impossible, but it's certainly less available here than most other e-readers. There is also no UK-based PocketBook store for the device. The one on mine is German, which is fine as it's all in English on my device, and they have a good selection of books in English for me to choose from on the store, but it is still limiting in some ways. One of those ways is access to accessories.

I like to get cases for my e-readers when I can to protect the screens when I chuck them in a bag or pocket. While I did manage to get a case for my PocketBook, it wasn't an official one. Instead it was a nice one I found on eBay illustrated with cats. While perfectly serviceable it does sometimes interfere with the auto-wake and sleep sensor on my PocketBook in a way that I doubt the official cases do. But there is no easy way to buy an official PocketBook case here in the UK. While we do have official suppliers for PocketBook here, they haven't put down any company roots in the UK. Probably because our e-book market is nearly 100% Kindle already.

Snag #4: Why does the mobile app do more than the e-reader?

If PocketBook can support OPDS on their mobile app, why not allow me to connect to my OPDS library directly on my Verse Pro? It would be amazing if I could easily browse my whole library just on the e-reader itself, especially with the lack of being able to do that via my PocketBook Cloud. For a company that claims to give you control over your own library, the device is weirdly unoptimised for doing this as easily as possible.

I also felt this annoyance when linking my Dropbox account to my Verse Pro Colour for testing. The mobile app login for Dropbox was a breeze, and allowed me to browse what I’d put in my PocketBook Sync folder, which you can setup automatically when connecting to Dropbox via the mobile app. However, on the Verse Pro Colour itself, the login process for Dropbox was slow and frustrating. I use a password manager so none of my login passwords are easy things to type in on a glacially responsive e-ink screen as it is, but not having a way to do some kind of passthrough login to Dropbox via my phone or something felt somewhat frustrating. After this it then automatically downloaded everything in my Dropbox sync folder to my e-reader. You can disable auto-sync, but that’s the default setting when you first log in. Understandable and not a dealbreaker, but it means Dropbox isn’t really a substitute for the lack of a browsable self-owned e-book library via PocketBook’s Cloud offering. This auto-download doesn’t happen on the mobile app.

Also, on the mobile app, everything in the Dropbox sync folder is visible to browse. On the e-reader itself, audiobook files don’t show up on the Dropbox menu. They do download onto the device, but you need to go to the Audiobooks section and search in the internal device folders for the Dropbox sync folder and select them from there to load them. So this means after you connect your Dropbox account, you can wirelessly load your audiobooks onto your PocketBook Verse Pro Colour, but the process is, again, just much clunkier than it really should be.

Snag #5: The reading UI could be a little more intuitive

This is really a very small gripe, but I feel like the reading UI could be a little nicer. There were a few things it took me a little longer to puzzle out that usual, like the dictionary and some of the text spacing options. Nothing that made the reading experience bad or stopped me from tailoring my reading experience and settings to my liking, but just enough to create a little bit of initial friction when I was getting used to using the Verse Pro Colour. This might just have been because it's a different UI again to the Kindle/Kobo/Bookfusion experiences I'd gotten used to up until this point. So definitely one I'd label more of a nitpick than an actual drawback.

Plus point #1: The mobile app is excellent

The PocketBook mobile app really opens up options for this e-reader with reading progress sync and OPDS support. It also makes up for some of the shortcomings of the Verse Pro Colour because of it's more comprehensive features. Being able to browse my Kavita library is excellent and I didn't experience any problems at all with reading progress sync. In terms of reading progress sync reliability, it's easily on-par with Kindle and Kobo's offerings. The Dropbox integration was snappy and intuitive, and the reading experience on the app is really good too with good customisation options. It also provides a really nice way to manage your PocketBook Cloud, which helps avoid the e-reader performance issues that show up on the Verse Pro when the cloud gets overloaded.

Plus point #2: A good night reader

The brightness options on this device are decent. While the lowest brightness setting could be lower and there's a little bit of light bleed at the very bottom edge of the screen, the Dark Mode option and light warmth settings make the Verse Pro Colour a really nice option for night reading in bed next to a sleeping partner. No sudden blindings or screen flashes when you need to open the reading menus or switch to the home screen. I still don't understand why so many other e-readers don't provide full device dark mode, but it's so refreshing seeing PocketBook get this right.

Plus point #3: ADE integration built-in

Built-in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) login is not an unusual option for e-readers (Kobo devices also have this) but it's always a nice to have. While I do strip the DRM from all my purchased e-books, I did test out reading a borrowed library e-book (I don't DRM-strip those as they're not mine and I like to be nice to public library services) on my PocketBook Verse Pro Colour with my signed in Adobe account and I had no problems at all. There were no extra steps or anything, it just worked seamlessly, like all my other e-books. So if you can't be bothered with stripping the DRM from your e-books, and the e-books you've purchased or borrowed are compatible with ADE (basically all e-books except Kindle ones are), then you should be able to upload them straight to PocketBook Cloud, or directly onto your device, without any worries as long as you setup your Adobe Digital Editions account.

Plus point #4: This audiobook player sparks joy

You can wirelessly connect your headphones to listen to audiobooks too and the audiobook player is perfectly serviceable. It has a really good number of options for adjustment including playback speed and pitch (pitch is especially fun to play around with). It absolutely wipes the floor with the sideload audiobook player offered by Kobo e-readers. No competition whatsoever.

The Bluetooth connection was also mercifully easy, connecting right away without any issues discovering my headphones. You can even use Dropbox to add your audiobooks to the Verse Pro wirelessly if you want. It also disconnects when your e-reader goes to sleep and automatically reconnects when you wake it up again. Overall, an extremely competent and well-considered audiobook experience for an e-reader device. While listening to audiobooks on an e-reader isn’t something I’m that bothered about, it’s still impressive to see it done so well and a restoration of my sanity after the Kobo horrors.

Plus point #5: Ergonomic for my tiny hands

This is a very nice e-reader to use. It's excellently pocket-sized, I just love this about these 6 inch e-readers, they're so portable. It's lightweight coming in at 183g without a case and 274g with my unofficial case, making it rank somewhere in the middle overall, being mid-range for caseless and on the lighter side with a case. Somewhere between the Kobo Clara Colour and the Meebook M6C.

The page turn buttons at the bottom of the device are pleasantly ergonomic and it's nice to have the home and sleep buttons on the front of the device for easy access. The buttons are really nice, with even responsiveness across the surface of the buttons and a satisfying click to them. I like that the page turn buttons are raised, so even in the dark it's easy to find them and tell which is forward and which is back. You can even customise the key mapping for them if you want. I also find having the buttons at the bottom where I usually hold my e-readers a lot more ergonomic than the Oasis-like e-readers I've tried, so this is definitely my personal preference and your mileage may vary.

Plus point #6: Customise all the things!

The general customisability options for this device are great. Full menu and reader dark mode, gesture and key mapping customisability, the ability to turn the LED indicator light on or off, being able to customise what loads on device startup and whether the PocketBook logo shows on screen in sleep mode, all the usual reading experience tweaks, etc. There are just so many options that really let you tailor this device to your preferences. Did I mention that I love that Dark Mode persists to the menu? Why are PocketBook the first ones outside Kindle to understand that people will want that? It made me ridiculously happy after going so long without it.

Plus point #7: Fun and games

It has some fun games like Klondike (Solitaire) you can play on it if you don't mind the janky refresh speeds of e-ink. It’s totally pointless to have this on an e-reader in my opinion, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t found myself idly playing a game or two on it anyway. The slow e-ink screen responsiveness is too clunky to make it an addictive gaming experience, but it’s a pleasant and unexpected addition that I think takes good advantage of having a colour e-ink screen.

Additional bits

For the Verse Pro Colour I also find myself with a couple of gimmicks that I don’t really care enough about to call snags, but thought worth mentioning regardless. I'd happily trade these gimmicks in if it meant the Verse Pro Colour could be slightly more responsive and speedy, or ironed out some of the snags mentioned above.

Gimmick #1 Who wants to fingerpaint on this?

You can add written notes to books, but there’s no stylus and writing on a tiny post-it with your finger on a tiny e-ink screen sucks. I'm never going to use it and I don’t understand why it’s even an option.

Gimmick #2 I want an e-reader not a personal organiser

There's a bunch of apps like calendar and calculator and gallery that make it seem like PocketBook genuinely think you'd consider using your e-reader as a personal organiser of some kind. In my opinion, this feels laughable as the performance of the device is simply not responsive enough. If I used this device as my daily planner I’d get frustrated with it pretty quickly.

Thoughts

PocketBook International, are a company currently headquartered in Switzerland and were founded in Ukraine by a guy who wanted to make a buck from booming online e-book "piracy". In 2012 the company was bought by a Russian guy called Andrey Konovalov, who still heads the company today. There's not really much more information that can be gleaned about them online despite my efforts. I can say that Andrey Konovalov appears to have kept an immaculately low profile.

He's done no interviews or press releases or any kind of public appearance I can find. From the Swiss companies register he's lived in Switzerland as of 2016, but I couldn't find any other personal information. His name does appear on a US lawsuit where PocketBook made a trademark claim against a domain squatter for the rights to pocketbook.com. A claim PocketBook lost initially, but then settled later after an appeal to get the domain. But this isn't exactly anything more interesting than businesses businessing. I can confirm that he doesn't appear on any sanctions lists so whatever reasons he has for keeping a low profile, they don't seem to be nefarious ones. I do find it a little odd that the company mention PocketBook being a Ukrainian founded company in a lot of places, but skip over the current owner being Russian. But maybe they just want to avoid the business getting caught up in the ongoing conflict and suffering as a result.

To pivot away from PocketBook company info, I want to remark that really hate the accepted use of the term "piracy" for copyright infringement. Unauthorised copying of things does not deserve to sound so cool. With that said, I can get on board with the idea of giving people a way to enjoy their digital libraries on their own terms without the need to box users into a closed ecosystem. It also opens up a question: Why isn't this approach dominating the market? Surely most customers would prefer to have more choice and ownership over their e-books?

And here we are again. Back at the consequences of monopolies. One of the really nasty trends in tech we see generally is the total and utter acceptance of customer lock-in. This exists to deliberately create monopolies. Every tech company's ultimate goal is to monopolise a niche market as totally as possible and by any means at their disposal. One of the main ways to do this is to prevent interoperability.

Interoperability is simply a word for things that can work across platforms/devices/systems. Rather than locking you into a specific tech ecosystem or device, accepted standards are used to allow applications or devices to be indifferent to your choices of manufacturer or developer or store. USB-C is a good modern example of this, as attested by every home with a box full of miscellaneous old mobile phone charging cables and other proprietary cable ephemora of yester year. EPUB files are also a good example of this specific to e-books. Basically all e-readers now support the EPUB e-book format in one way or another, meaning if your e-book is in EPUB format, you have ample choices for what app or e-reader you want to use when reading it. So obviously, Amazon have been extremely resistant to supporting the EPUB format, even though it's what everyone else is using.

But customers having choice is bad for business, because choice means we can choose to spend our money and share our data elsewhere. So tech companies typically work very hard to try and stop us doing that in whatever way they can. One of the main ways they do this with modern digital media is Digital Rights Management (DRM): Specialist encoding and encryption methods designed to make is as cumbersome as possible for the average customer to use their purchased product outside of the ecosystem permitted by the company.

When over 80% of the global e-book market has proprietary Kindle DRM that won't work on anything but a Kindle or Kindle app, reading your e-book library outside the Kindle ecosystem is more work than most customers are willing to tolerate. Why choose an interoperable device if legally purchasing non-Kindle e-books is less convenient than a single click on your DRM-locked Kindle? Why have e-book market competition when you can pay monthly for access to an extensive e-book monopoly service that all your favourite authors are exclusively locked into? As usual, convenience and aggressive market practices leave us all with limited options if we don't want to help Bezos fund more ten minute space jollies in his penis rocket for vapid celebrities.

The ultimate price for this easy convenience and exploitative lock-in is that we lose the option to take our custom elsewhere if the monopoly does things we don't like. It has never been harder to take your Kindle library full of digital books you paid for, and read them outside the Kindle ecosystem. Amazon have even changed the wording for e-book purchases on their sites now to "buying a license". You are exchanging your money for temporary access to one of Amazon's e-books, but only for as long as they want you to have it. If they want to update the cover art to advertise their new film/TV series or erase the book from your device entirely, you're expected to accept that. As customers, we should be so much angrier about how much this sucks for us.

So while I would like more from PocketBook when it comes to company information, ecological impact information, repairability, and a more robust Cloud service, the device itself does offer a more open and interoperable e-reading experience. If PocketBook really honed in on this unique feature of their e-readers and made using it as optimised and streamlined as possible, they'd be even more of a market standout than they are now. And if PocketBook really wanted to scrore brownie points with me, they'd consider developing a public API so I could make a Calibre plugin that would allow me to easily sync my e-reader library to PocketBook Cloud, like I can with Bookfusion. This device has so much more potential to offer freedom and choice back to digital readers.

Verdict

There is so much to like with the PocketBook Verse Pro Colour. It looks nice, it's ergonomic, it ticks most of my e-reader feature boxes pretty easily. But I'd be lying if I said it was the perfect device. It very nearly is, but there are still a couple of things that really could use some extra consideration and polish. Between the gimmicks, and performance issues with the PocketBook Cloud offering, it sometimes feels like PocketBook development is too unfocused. This device would be miles ahead of its competition if only it focused on doing the basics well, instead of trying to be more than a high quality, interoperable, e-reader. However, even with it's flaws in mind, I'd still recommend it overall as one of the better options available right now for people with existing e-book libraries looking to break away from Kindle.

The next installment in this e-reader madness series will be reviewing my experience hacking the Tolino Shine 4. Catch you later!