BOOX put its pocket reader, the Picco, on sale in its own online store on September 16, 2026. The listing answers the three questions its IFA debut left open: price, formats and battery. In the US it costs $109.99. The document formats BOOX lists include EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 but not PDF, and every book has to arrive through BOOX’s Tiles app or a web page. The battery is 920 mAh, and BOOX makes no runtime claim. By September 22 the US store showed the BOOX Picco as sold out, with no restock date.
Two prices behind “from $99.99”
The product page headline reads “From $99.99”. The store data behind the page shows two versions of the listing, one shipping from the United States at $109.99 and one from Hong Kong at $99.99. At the time, BOOX’s list of popular products on the same site showed “BOOX Picco US$109.99 Sold Out”.
BOOX announced pre-orders on September 28. On October 18 its store listed both versions, US and Hong Kong, as “To Be Shipped Around November”. BOOX hasn’t said which countries the Hong Kong version ships to. If you want the cheaper version, check its shipping and import charges before counting on the $10 saving.
The hardware on the spec sheet
The Picco has a 3.97-inch monochrome touchscreen at 480 by 800 pixels, which BOOX gives as 235 PPI. There are physical page buttons, and the front light adjusts between warm and cold. It measures 105.5 by 62 by 5.5 mm, roughly the footprint of a credit card and a little thicker than one, and weighs about 58 g.
Storage is a 16 GB microSD card that comes installed, and BOOX says the slot takes cards up to 2 TB. For wireless there’s 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. BOOX doesn’t say how many hours or days of reading the 920 mAh battery gives. The box holds the Picco, the card, three screen protectors and a quick start guide with a warranty card. No charging cable appears on that list.
What it will open
BOOX lists these document formats: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, AZW, AZW5, FB2, FB2.ZIP, FB3, FBZ, TXT, PDB, PRC, RTF, HTML, XHTML, HTM and CHM. For images it supports PNG, JPEG, WEBP, BMP and GIF. A line under the list adds: “Formats above require transfer via BOOX Tiles app or web.” The only apps BOOX names are Pomodoro, Todo and Countdown.
PDF is missing, but on a screen this size that’s not much of a loss, since a full page shrunk to four inches is hard to read anyway. Protected books are the bigger gap, because nothing on the sheet mentions Adobe DRM or LCP. BOOX also lists no app store and no third-party apps, so the Kindle, Kobo and Libby apps have nowhere to go. Going by BOOX’s list, that leaves the DRM-free EPUBs you already own, books from publishers and stores that sell without DRM, and public domain libraries.
What runs underneath
BOOX says the Picco is the first reader in a new line called Tiles, a branch beside its Android tablets. The store page names neither the chip nor the software. CrossPoint, an open-source reading system written for small ESP32-based readers, gives a clue. A pull request opened in that project on October 11 adds a Picco configuration with ESP32-S3 support and a partition table for the Picco’s stock layout. On October 18 it still hadn’t been merged.
That makes third-party firmware a possibility for owners who like to tinker. BOOX doesn’t mention it anywhere on the store page, and its one-year warranty is the only cover a buyer can count on. If you’re tempted to flash a community build, ask BOOX first how that affects the warranty.
Where it fits next to a Kobo or a BOOX Go 6
When readerpilot.com looked at pocket-sized e-readers on September 7, the Picco’s formats, price and battery were all unknown, and the advice was to wait for them. Two of the three are now public, and they put the Picco in a narrow slot: a second reader for people with a DRM-free EPUB library who want something that fits in a jeans pocket.
If you buy from a store or borrow from a library, a six-inch reader is the better buy. The Kobo Clara BW has the Kobo store built in and borrows from Libby libraries right on the reader. The BOOX Go 6 runs Android with Google Play, so the Kindle, Kobo and Libby apps all install, though it costs more and is larger.
If the Picco’s size is what draws you, wait for the November shipments and a published battery figure. Check too that the Tiles app suits how you move files, because the app or a web page is the only way to get books onto it.
