Alessandro Zanello

At CeBIT 2010, Asus has officially introduced its first ebook reader, the DR-900.

It 'a model to grayscale, epaper 9-inch screen, which focuses on handling and long battery life, with an epaper display from 9 inches (23 cm diagonal, 222 x 161 x 9 mm) with 16 shades of Gray and resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 150 dpi. Produced by the California SiPix, this screen has a touch screen technology and can also be used to write text by hand.

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Download from here , even in this PDF viewer portable version (Zip file of 6 MB, requires no installation but just unzip to a folder) presents interesting features. First of all it is free for personal and commercial use, is also very fast and efficient and supports various languages ​​including Italian.

There is also a PRO version, which costs $ 34.50 per license, and in this case offers the following additional options:

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Announced by Barnes & Noble , one of the giants of American book along with Amazon, comes nook, the ebook reader in recent days in advance in order to strengthen its online store, which now boasts more than 700,000 titles divided into several categories. He displays a 6-inch e-ink for reading and a smaller color display that acts as a virtual keyboard. Allows annotations, supports an additional memory card and also works as a digital photo frame, announced the price is $ 259 and availability is limited for now to the U.S. market.
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Built with Embedded Video

From now on Kindle2, the e-book reader produced by Amazon, and so far only available in the U.S., is preordinabile online in over 100 countries, including Italy. The first orders will start shipping by the 19th of October, it announced officially Amazon . The Kindle comes with free 3G wireless internet connection (the same used by cell phones and smartphones), which lets you download books, magazines, newspapers as well as personal documents on-screen e-ink 6-inch high-definition, - sure Amazon - can be read very similar to that of paper. Beware though, this is the normal Kindle2, the Kindle DX does not screen from 9.7 inches, still only available in the States at $ 489. more »

A new format called EPUB starting to be talked about and a self-respecting player should know what it is.

In recent years the field of electronic publishing has had a strong acceleration is on the front of the media (see the e-ink devices , but also supports more heterodox for reading, such as PDAs, smartphones or netbooks), both in terms of formats, with the prevalence of PDF, the industry standard.

In general, however, the pdf is wrong most of the roads to make their content accessible to the widest possible audience, because it is a format reimpaginabile. The PDF is perfect for printing, but this is limiting their structural rigidity when it becomes necessary to read the content of media (viewers) of different sizes.

By publishing a digital title, he must bear in mind the various requirements of readers, ranging from the screens to 6 ", 8" or 10 "electronic ink devices, to about 3-4 inches of a cell, up to 20" or more than one monitor.

For smaller devices to read a file, in A5 format, it means having to work with the zoom on individual pages and drag the sheet to the second part of the page you are reading, which force the reader to various discomfort to intrude in ' illegibility.

For this reason the development of a wide variety of readers, have formed so-called parallel distributed reimpaginabili (reflowable), whose content fits the screen, showing more or fewer lines per page, depending on the device that displays them.

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Elonex, an English company specializing in low cost devices, presents a new eBook reader with e-Ink screen from 6 inches.

The device has a thickness of 9 mm and a weight of 180 grams, has an internal memory of 4 GB and supports additional 4GB card, allowing you to store thousands of books in PDF format and images in various formats.

The e-Ink screens, like the Sony PRS505 , consume energy only when the page is turned, so the internal battery has a range of 8000 pages, equivalent to about 3 months of reading.

It will be sold in England by the bookstore chain Borders at 189 pounds, about 220 euros, with 100 eBooks for free, an attractive price given the competition. The package includes charger and data cable.

The Sony PRS-505 Reader Digital Book is a digital player that lets you effortlessly carry around a library (to SD / SDHC or Sony), reads in full sun, the battery ricaricabile ion battery lasts long enough to turn approximately 7,500 pages (if not consumed by turning pages or playing music).

Electronic paper makes it almost as well as the actual paper and reads well everywhere, while reading it can play music in MP3 and AAC files (with optional earphone).

Supports Adobe PDF, RTF, text and displays grayscale images in JPEG format.

Features

24/07/2008 With the software update available here , the unit:

• also supports the EPUB format
• supports Adobe ® Digital Editions 1.5
• allows you to "reformat" on the fly PDF improving the text readability
• supports SDHC cards with more than 4 GB
• erases the books directly from its menu

And 'the most affordable solution currently on the market (compared to Kindle, Cybook, Iliad and the like) for reading addicts, by experience.