Penn State Hands Out Sony Readers

Penn State is trying an experiment. As the university notes on its Web site, it will begin a yearlong pilot program using the Sony Reader. (Sony donated 100 of them to the university libraries.) The readers will be used in the English department, will be available for borrowing in the Course Reserve Reading Room, and will be used in the libraries’ first-year seminar class for developing information literacy skills.

Here Comes the Kindle Competitor?

So the rumors about a new Kindle have been quashed by Amazon. But there is an 8×11″ e-book reader on the horizon. It’s just coming from a different company. TG Daily has a brief update about a new reader from Plastic Logic with plenty of good photos. You can catch it at http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39220-97.html. Wired.com has a few more details at http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/plastic-logics.html and some more pictures.

Briefly: 8×11 view display, flexible plastic (Wired has a picture of the reader going all bendy), pop-up touch-sensitive keywords, Office documents read without fuss, no price announced as yet (bummer.)

Big Screen Kindle in the Works?

This is an interesting blog post about a big screen Kindle and what it might do for the textbook market. And when you think about it, prices on Kindles wouldn’t have to even drop that much for this to be a great idea. If you halved the price of textbooks when making them available electronically, the Kindle pays for itself in — what — a year?

Unfortunately there are a couple of big Kindle drawbacks. B&W only, for one. You also can’t mark it all over with a yellow highlighter and Post-It flags.