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Ebooks seem to be the tech gadget flavor of the month, with a whole library full of major announcements about new Ebook devices coming up recently. We have already posted on the newest Sony Readers, and these have begun to hit SonyStyle stores, and there is a great “first impression” post HERE by MobileRead user DrMoze.

On top of that, here is an excellent video overview of the Sony Touch Reader by Lisa at MobileTechReview.

Click HERE to see her full comprehensive review of the device…and by the way, to answer a question posed by Pony99CA, the device has BOTH an SD and a MemoryCard slot.  Lisa’s conclusions following a very complete review are as follows:

Sony has done a very good job this time and the Sony Reader Touch Edition is a pleasure to use in terms of touch interface and screen readability. For $299, the Reader offers a great array of features including native PDF support with zoom, ePUB and Adobe Digital Editions compatibility, the responsive 6" eInk touch screen with natural page turn gesture support, both text and graphical note taking applications, text annotation (both highlighter and pencil style) and Google book compatibility. We love the dictionary and how easy it is to use, and have already found a few libraries to borrow ebooks from thanks to the library finder built into the new desktop software. Sony’s selection of commercial books is very good, though they still don’t offer as many titles as Amazon. They’ve lowered their prices and are now closer to Amazon’s pricing. The industry has a ways to go and grow, but Sony is heading in the right direction with their support for not just commercial storefront titles but public domain books and digital library books.

However, there is even more Ebook Hardware on the horizon as Digitimes is reporting that, never ones to let a tech trend get past them unexploited, both Asus and MSi are considering releasing Ebook Readers of their own. Asus is hoping to have theirs out by the end of the year, as part of the Eee PC range (EeeBook?).

In terms of Ebook formats, Google has aimed another shot across Amazon’s bow by coming in more strongly behind the ePub open source format already being pushed by Sony and it’s new readers. According to Google, more then a million open source texts are available in both ePub and PDF formats at Google Books. While Google admits these have been scanned and posted without much QA or text checking, it at least saves you downloading them from Project Gutenberg and converting them yourself.

If I read the signs properly, the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 look to be exciting times for we Ebook fans.

Zealot (473 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).