On CNet, Scott Stein writes about why a $79 Kindle has replaced his iPad as his e-book-reading device of choice. The reasons aren’t really new, and indeed have popped up any time anyone has ever compared e-ink devices to tablets for reading: eyestrain-reducing e-ink screens, less potential for distraction, longer battery life, and less potential for being stolen (and less of a loss if it is). It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as screen display technology gets better and lets tablets steal some of the screen-readability and battery life benefits of e-readers. Will dedicated e-readers...

Is the e-reader doomed? According to Matt Alexander on The Loop, it might just be on its way out as tablets get better and better. Alexander’s argument basically boils down to the fact that e-ink is an intermediate step, a necessary compromise between readability and display quality. E-ink is evolving toward being able to present color and full motion video, he suggests—and when you have an e-reader that can do that, it won’t be an e-reader anymore, but rather a tablet. And really, the naming of these devices, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet/Color,...

I previously mentioned Barnes & Noble selling refurbished Nook Colors on eBay for $130, but it turns out that’s not the only great e-reader deal the site is offering. CNet notes that, today and tomorrow only, B&N is listing the new, not refurbished, Nook Simple Touch e-reader on eBay for $74.99 ($25 off the current sale price elsewhere) with delivery by December 22. It notes that only a limited quantity of the readers are available, and it seems to sell out and get resupplied throughout the day. That’s $25 less than Amazon’s touchscreen Kindle With Special Offers. Might be...

FutureBook looks at South Korean company Kyobo’s new color “e-ink” reader, whose Mirasol screen has the same read-in-direct-sunlight capability as black and white e-ink. The device has a 5.7” 1024x768 pixel video-capable multitouch touchscreen, wifi, and English-language text-to-speech. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1 GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor, and costs $300.  FutureBook’s conclusions are not very complimentary. It would appear to be halfway between a smartphone and a tablet. It reads ebooks but is that its main draw and in our opinion it fails on some basic counts. It is not a smartphone. Size...

Can airport X-ray machines harm your Kindle? Some e-ink Kindle owners have discovered their e-readers stopped working after passing them through airport security X-ray machines. The culprit is thought to be not the radiation from the X-rays themselves, but the static electricity that can build up from the circulating rubber conveyor belt and could be strong enough to disrupt the e-ink capsules in the reader’s screen. Spokesmen for Amazon, which is replacing the damaged Kindles, insist that X-raying your Kindle is perfectly safe. “Many Kindle users travel by air, and their Kindles are screened by airport security every...

Remember Bookeen? The company made a line of e-readers called Cybooks. Back in 2007, it was going to make an e-reader for Baen, but it never materialized. In the last few weeks, they’ve made a couple of announcements about an impending new e-ink technology called HSIS (High Speed Ink System) that will be fast enough to allow scrolling and panning around web pages. On GigaOm, Kevin C. Tofel presents a 10-second YouTube video of a demo of the e-ink technology, showing a screen scrolling around on a website. It looks pretty good; comparable to what it looks like to...

For those who favor the Sony Reader, Engadget reports that the latest version, with wi-fi and a Pearl e-ink touchscreen, has just become available for pre-order for $149.99 from Sony’s website. The device will ship sometime around October 16th. I have my doubts that Sony is going to have staying power in the e-reader biz for much longer, but perhaps it will surprise me. At any rate, if you have a thing for the Sony Reader, have a blast....

Seemingly relegated to the also-ran position by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and possibly even Kobo, Sony is still not giving up the e-reader fight just yet. Engadget reports on finding a new wi-fi-equipped Sony PRS-T1 e-reader for sale on a Dutch webpage. The device hews to the standard black, angular Sony style, and Engadget speculates that it might be Android-powered just based on what its control buttons look like. The device costs €165 (equivalent to $240 US) on that website, and will probably be a bit cheaper when and if it’s introduced here—but can it be cheap...

Anyone remember Plastic Logic? One of the first wave of would-be Kindle competitors, the company got as far as taking pre-orders for its e-ink tablets before it simply fizzled, and was later bought by a Russian company which funded a $700 million e-reader manufacturing plant. Now it comes out that Plastic Logic is producing e-readers again, and the first 1,000 of them will be part of a pilot program testing e-readers in Russian schools. The tablets run 12,000 Roubles (about $420 US) each; if the program takes off, providing tablets to Russia’s 52,000 schools could be rather lucrative. Perhaps...

E-ink e-book readers are really taking off. E Ink Holdings, the manufacturer of the screens used by most e-ink readers today, has just adjusted its production estimates upward. The company now estimates that by the end of 2011, it will have shipped 25 to 30 million screens this year. Can you imagine that? Potentially 30 million new e-ink e-book readers could be manufactures by the end of the year using screens from just this one company. Hard to believe that just a few years ago we were all wondering if e-readers would ever take off. (Found via eBookNewser.)...

I’m not sure if I buy this, but Dave Zatz of “Zatz Not Funny” is reporting a rumor that suggests Amazon’s upcoming Android tablet could have a very interesting, idiosyncratic screen display format. According to a friend of Zatz’s who was seated on a flight next to someone who claimed to be a highly-placed Amazon exec, the tablet will feature both a color LCD and an e-ink screen—but unlike the Nook and the Alex, these screens will not be on the same surface. Instead, they will be on opposite sides of the device, like the faces of a coin. ...

TechCrunch reports that Kobo is introducing a new model touchscreen e-reader priced at $129, dropping the price of its earlier model to $99. This new model has the same ultra-sharp Pearl e-ink display as the current generation of Kindle, a better processor, a touch-sensitive screen (with gestures such as swiping and zooming), and a built-in dictionary. The touchscreen is neither capacitive nor resistive, but uses zForce infrared, so it shouldn’t suffer from the hazy look common to prior touchscreen readers. This looks like it could be a very useful alternative to the Kobo or Kindle for people who don’t...