Nearly five months to the day after Amazon introduced its Kindle 2 e-reader, the company has decided to hack a full $60 off of the price tag in order to offer it to US consumers for $299. Sneaking under that magical $300 mark could allow the outfit to move an awful lot more of these buggers, and with the competition finally heating up, we'd say it's probably a solid defensive move as well. So, are you interested in pulling the trigger now that the Kindle 2 is under three bills? Or is that e-book app on your smartphone doing just fine?

[Thanks, Michael]

Elonex has been dabbling in small screen wares for quite some time now, so it's not a huge surprise to finally see it join the likes of BeBook, Sony and Amazon by introducing its very own eBook reader. Design wise, the 6-inch reader looks an awful lot like that played-out OEM model that everyone seems to start with, but hey, you won't find us kvetching about competition. The device is launching exclusively at Borders UK, and with that comes the new Borders eBook Download Store. With a 4GB expansion card, there's room for some 8,000 ebooks, and the 9 millimeter-thin frame ensures that this one won't bog you down too much. Interested consumers over in the UK can snap this one up right now for £189 ($311), and that price nets you 100 free ebooks, a charger, data cable and a great sense of pride.

[Thanks, Sam]

We can't say they look a whole heck of a lot different than the EB-300 and EB-100, but Netronix's EB-600 and EB-500 are still a push in the right direction. Seen at Computex, these e-readers pack a battery good for 8,000 page turns as well as a 6-inch (EB-600) / 5-inch (EB-500) e-ink display. We were even told that the EB-500 may end up with a slide-out keyboard, but as of now, all we can do is sit Indian style, meditate on the hands-on shots down in the read link and dream of what may some day be.

While you might say Amazon's Kindle is lucky to have a single CDMA / EV-DO radio built-in, IAC would likely venture to disagree. Over at Computex, said firm was showcasing its Prodigy e-reader, which just so happens to pack every major wireless radio we can think of. EV-DO Rev. A? Check. WCDMA / HSPA? Check. WiMAX? Oh, definitely. 802.11b/g WiFi? For sure, dudes. And the fun doesn't stop there -- it's packing a 6-inch 800 x 600 e-paper touchscreen, 256MB of NAND Flash memory, 128MB of DDR memory, 2GB of NAND storage and a Marvell PXA310 processor. If all goes well, this little bugger will ship in Q4 over in Taiwan, but it'll be a cold day in Hades before it arrives on US soil. Video's after the break.

Wow, just wow. We were about three months away from putting Pixel Qi on a temporary vaporware watch, and now we couldn't be happier about shoving this crow down our throats. The outfit's so-called 3qi display technology -- which seamlessly integrates e-ink with LCD -- was on display this week at Computex, and there's a beautiful video just after the break that shows it off. Put simply, we've never seen a laptop display look as good in broad daylight as Pixel Qi's display, and even though there's no striking colors in the black-and-white e-ink mode, at least you can see the thing (clearly, at that) without squinting. Seriously, hop on past the break and mash play.

Amazon just dropped word that the new Kindle DX will start shipping out on June 10th, a pleasant improvement on the previously vague "summer" release date. The device is still available for pre-order, and shipments of the $489, 9.7-inch, PDF-capable ebook will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

You're probably wondering what's been happening with that super thin, super sexy Plastic Logic e-book reader that we've seen floating around various tradeshows. Well, the device has landed at D7, and it's got a few new features cooked up -- most notably, built-in 3G data. There's no specifics on what carriers or bands, but besides that WiFi connectivity, you'll be able to go totally nuts out in the real world. Additionally, it looks like the company has seriously tweaked the UI, now providing a simple and clear interface for getting around your documents, and a page-turning gesture (don't mind the green tint in the pic above, the screen is still very much grayscale). The slate is definitely lust-worthy, but we noted a fairly slow screen refresh (way slower than the Kindle), which is kind of a downer -- along with that fairly distant 2010 launch date. Plastic Logic also made an appearance on Fox Business News today, and the video is embedded after the break.

Slowly but surely, those oh-so-juicy details are leaking out about Endless Ideas' upcoming duo of e-readers. We've now learned that the BeBook mini will boast the same specifications as the original BeBook, save for the much more compact 5-inch display; if all goes well, it should be available for purchase this summer for €199 ($270). Moving on to the BeBook 2, we've learned that it will include both WiFi and 3G access right out of the box, and the company is currently working with mobile operators in Germany and France in hopes of providing Kindle-like data access for on-the-go book downloads. Unfortunately, it looks like the asking price of that one will hover in the €350 ($476) to €400 ($544) range, but you can check out a Dutch interview with the new announcements just past the break.

[Via Slashgear]

Upstart company Interead is looking to jump into the ever-expanding library of e-book readers with its debut, the COOL-ER. Company founder Neil Jones describes it as the "iPod moment that e-readers have been waiting for," calling the device the first of its kind to be designed specifically for the non-technologically inclined reader in mind. Indeed, the aesthetics seems to borrow liberally from the iPod nano, and features eight different color options. It weighs in at 6.3 ounces, or a little less than half of the Kindle 2, with the same 6-inch e-ink screen, and is small enough to fit comfortably in your jacket pocket, he says. It's got 1GB internal memory and a SD card slot, as well as a 2.5mm headphone jack with a 3.5mm converter bundled with every device. The feature set is pretty barebones, with no keyboard, text-to-speech, WiFi, or Whispernet equivalent -- all files have to be loaded via USB or SD card -- but in its place is a more attractive $250 MSRP, and Jones assures us at that price the company'll be making a profit on each unit sold. Format support includes EPUB, TXT, JPEG, any kind of PDF, MP3 for audio, and eight languages including Russian and traditional / simplified Chinese. The company's also launching an e-book store and offering an extra discount for customers who register their COOL-ER. It'll go on sale May 29th for US and Europe via its website, with retail distribution partner expected to be announced closer to the launch date. We're gonna wait until we get a few chapters into Alice in Wonderland before giving a final verdict, but in the meantime, check out our initial hands-on in the gallery below.

Read - Product page
Read - Online store

In a collision of journalistic labs heretofore unseen, the folks at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab hit up The New York Times' R&D lab for a look at what those ink-stained word-slingers think about the future of newspaper delivery. Nick Bilton, "Design Integration Editor" at the NY Times, and ever calm in the face of futurism, gave a guided tour of the devices they're currently looking at, and while there aren't a lot of surprises, it is nice to see they're taking ebooks, netbooks and touchscreen PCs all very seriously. Of particular note is a (sadly damaged) e-ink prototype with a newspapery layout, complete with typography, designed for an "e-ink device that [doesn't] exist yet." Nick also makes mention of Mary Lou Jepsen's upcoming Pixel Qi display, along with the marvelous world of RFID-based ads. Check out the full content delivery nerd-out on video after the break.

The Kindle DX launch might have sparked a wave of hype about the next generation of newspapers, but not everyone's so quick to agree: Dallas Morning News CEO James Moroney told a Senate subcommittee yesterday that the Kindle isn't a "platform that's going to save newspapers in the near term." According to Moroney, Amazon demands 70 percent of subscription revenue from newspapers, and further requires content owners to grant Amazon the right to republish content to other devices -- like, say, the iPhone. That's a pretty inequitable split, and while we understand that Amazon has to pay for Whispernet somehow, it's hard to imagine newspaper publishers lining up to wager 70 percent of their digital subscription revenues and a perpetual license to their content on devices that are far from proven. On the other hand, it's innovate or die time for these guys, so we'll see what happens -- with all the competitors out there poised to make a move, things are about to get interesting.