Visitors
to this year's Cebit trade show have the first chance to see a new version of
the BeBook electronic book reader from Dutch company Endless Ideas.
The new model has been redesigned to include 3G cellular and/or a WiFi data link, touchscreen navigation and RSS support, said the mybeebook company in a posting on its Web site.
The device will also get ePub DRM (digital rights management) support over the next few months and is due to be launched in the middle of this year. No other details were immediately available.
The electronic book market recently saw the introduction of the second-generation version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. That device also includes cellular support but is only available in the U.S., where Amazon has a tie-up with a network operator.
Sony has also seen some success with its Sony Reader e-book tablet and has been adding support for a wider variety of data formats to better compete with the Kindle. It supports the BBeB and ePub formats with DRM and unprotected text files in the BBeB, ePub, TXT, RTF, PDF and Word formats. Additionally it can show several types of image files and play MP3 and AAC audio files.
The first-edition BeBook, which was launched in 2008, has won praise for its ease of use and inclusion of around 20,000 classic books with each reader.
"Latest BeBook E-book Reader to Be Unveiled at Cebit" Comments:
I am going to sound like a broken record on this one. While I am very interested in Kindle, I am still waiting for these books to be DRM free. It's just so much easier and "thought-free" when I don't have to worry about DRM and how I use something. The higher the resolution, the better it is too. We are nowhere near true 300-dpi but that's a technical limitation at this point.
Maybe all these new ebooks coming out and the competition will encourage easier transfer of content without having to think about DRM too much.
Speaking of DRM-free, Amazon does have an awesome MP3 store that is DRM-free with a large selection and often good prices. It would be nice if they had the same thing with books.
It's good to see competitors to Amazon'sKindle (2). Several of them are coming out. It will be quite interesting in the next couple of years.
If someone was smart, they would develop an arrangment for colleges to give eReaders to incoming freshmen and make all of the schools texts available as ebooks. It probably wouldn't save the students any money, but it would beat lugging all those books! The ebook could also download notes from lectures and could be used for emergency comunications, i.e Virginia Tech.