Sony has posted service manuals for two new and announced e-readers... and of course someone found out and posted them. The first is the PRS-300 with a 5" display, 440MB of user storage. The second is the PRS-600, with a 6" touchscreen, audio support, 380MB of storage and SD/MS slots.
Sony says that over one million public-domain books are now available for their e-readers (PRS-505 and PRS-700). Sony is using Google's Books project for these books, which are available in EPUB format.
Amazon has over 300,000 titles in their Kindle store, and Barnes & Nobles, which recently announced their own online bookstore, has over 700,000 titles, out of which more than 500,000 are public domain, also powered by the Google Books project.
Samsung is set to release a new e-reader, the SNE-50K, in Korea. The display is a 5" Touch screen, monochrome, probably E Ink but we do not have official word yet.
Smarthouse reports that Apple will soon launch a new tablet with a 10.6" display, made by LG Display. It will either be an OLED, or a LED-based LCD. The new tablet will double as an e-reader, competing with Amazon's new Kindle DX).
This is interesting. E Ink displays are much more suited for books than LCDs (more efficient, readable in the sun, and easy on the eye) - but a general table has much more usages, and also color, of course. What will people prefer?
Digitimes reports that AUO will start producing ePaper for e-readers soon. Shipments are expected in 3Q 2009.
The panels will be 6" to 9" at first, but the company will also be working on 10" and even A4 sizes later.
Polymer Vision has had financial problems for a while, and back in April they delayed their flexible E Ink display based Readius reader. Now we hear that the company is bankrupt. This is sad - it would have been great to finally have a flexible display reader!
The Readius had a 16-grayscale 320x240 5" e ink based display. When closed the size is 115x57x21mm, and when you open the display, it's 160x115x21mm.Â
The "New" Democratic Leadership Council
in Washington has a new plan - the Government will buy
They say it will be cost effective because currently the government spends over 100$ in text books, and ebook reader will fall in price soon. (currently the Kindle DX, the only one that can read text-books, costs 489$...).
A Chinese company called Peking University Founder is showing a new eBook reader, that looks just like Amazon's Kindle 2. They say they will release it by the end of 2009, in Japan, for around 210$ (the kindle 2, by the way, costs 299$).
It includes a cellular connection (they say it needs a SIM card) to download new books, and will use their own 'Apabi' ebook software. The screen is 'about' 6", not sure what kind of display yet.
