The book world’s latest obsession? An e-reader the size of your phone

For a while, the great reading question was whether you preferred the weight and smell of a physical book or the convenience of carrying an entire library on a Kindle. That debate feels a little dated now. Kindle popularised the idea of taking your books with you on a screen, but the e-reader has been around long enough that we have moved on to a far more specific concern. How small can this thing get?

Reading itself is having a very visible moment. Big TV adaptations such as Off Campus are sending people back to the books they came from, while celebrities are sharing their favourite reads even as book clubs keep popping up everywhere. Now the tech world seems to have decided that the reading device deserves a little attention too, and the market is filling up with increasingly pocketable options.

The M5Paper S3 arrived in 2025, and Xteink released the X3 and X4 Pro earlier this year, both with magnetic phone attachments. The Boox Picco and PocketBook Q are slated for later this year, while DuRoBo’s Krono also joined the market in 2026, adding to a growing category of devices that are making the Kindle look increasingly bulky and conventional. Most of these readers sit somewhere between four and six inches, putting them firmly in phone-sized territory. Some, like the X3 and the Picco, are even smaller than the 5x3-inch iPhone Duo (when closed).

The timing is interesting because people are also having a bit of a love affair with tech that has personality. Flip phones have become part of the analogue push, cyberdecking was all over the place earlier this year, and there is an appetite for gadgets that look good sitting on your desk and in your hand. A tiny e-reader fits right in. Imagine pulling out something that fits neatly in your palm and casually reading The Odyssey on it. These gadgets, especially the magnetic ones, also double as an accessory and are often used as props for BookTok images, which makes its actual usefulness feel almost secondary.

There is a practical reason for the appeal, too. One Reddit user described the idea as “habit substitution”, or having something effortless to carry that you can reach for in the moments when you would normally reach for your phone and some more doomscrolling. That makes a tiny reader useful on a commute, while waiting for a friend or whenever you find yourself reaching for Instagram out of muscle memory.

And then there are the people pushing the idea into wonderfully gimmicky territory. The RSVP Nano, which also released earlier this year, for instance, flashes one word at a time and can apparently help you reach 800 words per minute. It sounds slightly ridiculous, but that is also the fun of this little corner of tech.

There are obvious drawbacks. Tiny screens can feel cramped, some devices make you jump through hoops to access the books you already own, and Kindle still has the enormous advantage of being the Kindle. It is also worth asking whether we really need to keep adding every new tech device to our growing pile of e-junk, buying another shiny little device that could end up abandoned once the novelty wears off. But the sheer number of launches suggests that people are willing to make room for one more little screen if it gives them a reason to put the big one down. Reading in any form cannot really hurt anyone, can it?