BOOX put its pocket reader, the Picco, on sale in its own online store on 16 September 2026, and the listing answers the three questions left open at its IFA debut: 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, with no runtime claim. By 22 September the BOOX Picco was marked sold out in the US store, with no restock date.
Price, and why the store says “from $99.99”
The product page headline reads “From $99.99”, which is how several launch reports quoted it. Behind the page, the store data shows two versions of the listing, one shipping from the United States at $109.99 and one shipping from Hong Kong at $99.99. BOOX’s own list of popular products on the same site shows “BOOX Picco US$109.99 Sold Out”.
BOOX has not said when stock will return or which countries the Hong Kong version ships to. Shipping and import charges on the cheaper version are the buyer’s to check before counting on the $10 saving.
The hardware on the sheet
The Picco has a 3.97-inch monochrome touchscreen at 480 by 800 pixels, which BOOX gives as 235 PPI. It has physical page buttons and a front light with warm and cold adjustment. It measures 105.5 by 62 by 5.5 mm and weighs about 58 g, roughly the footprint of a credit card and a little thicker than one.
Storage is a 16 GB microSD card that comes installed, and BOOX says the slot takes cards up to 2 TB. Wireless is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. BOOX publishes no hours or days of reading for the 920 mAh battery. In the box are 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. Images in PNG, JPEG, WEBP, BMP and GIF are supported. A line under the list adds: “Formats above require transfer via BOOX Tiles app or web.” The only apps named are Pomodoro, Todo and Countdown.
PDF is missing, and on a screen this size that is not much of a loss, since a full page shrunk to four inches is hard to read anyway. The larger gap is protected books. Nothing on the sheet mentions Adobe DRM or LCP, and the Picco does not run Android, so the Kindle, Kobo and Libby apps cannot be installed. The eBook Reader, which follows the category closely, concluded at launch that it does not support books from Libby, Amazon, Kobo or other major stores unless they are DRM-free. In practice, the Picco reads the EPUBs you already own without protection, from publishers and stores that sell DRM-free, plus public domain libraries.
What runs underneath
BOOX calls the Picco the first device in a line it names Tiles, and its larger readers run Android. This one does not. ReadMe.Club, a site that covers e-readers, analysed the firmware and reported on 17 September that it is built on version 1.2 of CrossPoint, an open-source reading system written for small ESP32-based readers, and that it runs on an ESP32-S3 chip. BOOX has not described the software in those terms on its store page.
The same report carried BOOX’s position on custom firmware. The company does not support it and says that attempting it may void the warranty. That matters because similar ESP32 readers attract owners who flash their own software, and on the Picco that route is officially closed.
Where it fits against a Kobo or a BOOX Go 6
When readerpilot.com looked at pocket-sized e-readers on 7 September, 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 place the Picco in a narrow slot. It is a second reader for people with a DRM-free EPUB library who want something that fits in a jeans pocket.
For anyone who buys from a store or borrows 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 on the device. The BOOX Go 6 runs Android with Google Play, so Kindle, Kobo and Libby apps all install, at a higher price and a larger size.
If the Picco’s size is the draw, wait for the restock and a published battery figure. Also confirm that the Tiles app suits how you move files, because the app or web page is the only way books get onto it.
