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By David Rothman

Screen size of the new PocketBook 360 is five inches, and  supposedly the price will be $300.

But here’s the real news. A $400 model with a six-inch touch screen, Blue Tooth, GPRS and 3G will follow in October if all goes as planned.

The more expensive model, at least, is to let you connect a keyboard via Blue Tooth. Possibilities for note-taking? What’s more there’ll be an RSS reader. Salvation for news junkies on the go?

Check out the page-changing interfaces for both models shown in the videos. What do you think?

Beyond the PocketBooks: The e-reader as a commodity

At the macro level, I wonder what all these Kindle rivals will mean ultimately for the original Kindle.

Turn hardware into a commodity, spread around the ePub standard, and offer zillions of books from different stores, and then what’s Amazon’s advantage if it clings to its proprietary ways?

Could Amazon have a few tricks up its sleeves with shared annotations?

If I were the IDPF, I’d get off my rear end, care about this capability and come up with appropriate standards. Publishers could help by supporting the IDPF more generously than they do now—to speed things up.

Detail: I don’t know about the ePub or DRM capabilities of the PocketBook machines—did I miss that in the video?—but if they don’t come with the PocketBooks, then rivals will fill the gap.

Related: our earlier post here, Google newsroundup, Ubergizmo and MobileRead post.

 
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