BookPlace
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Toshiba adds 6-inch BookPlace Mono to its Japan e-reader lineup
While Toshiba's already got a bevy of e-readers on tap for its Japanese online e-book store, it just added a budget-oriented monochrome offering: the BookPlace Mono. It's a slightly smaller but otherwise identical looking version of its BookPlace DB50 reader, carrying a 6-inch E Ink screen with 758 x 1,024 pixels, along with an 800MHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, WiFi, 4GB internal memory, a Micro SD slot and a USB port. According to Japanese e-book site ITMedia, 9,800 yen ($100) gets you the reader plus a set of books, with the price climbing to 13,500 yen ($150) after that. Changes to Toshiba's BookPlace e-book store mean buyers there will have to traipse over to one of a network of bookstores to grab it, though -- either by sneaker or mouse, we presume.
Toshiba announces color e-reader in Japan, hopes people buy more e-books from its store
If you're gonna be late to a party, you should at least be fashionably late. That's the mindset behind Toshiba's entry into the dedicated e-reader space with its new 7-inch BookPlace DB50. Toshiba hopes adding an e-reader alongside its existing AT200 and Thrive tablets will push more eyeballs towards the 100,000 or so titles in its BookPlace online bookstore. The ¥22,000 ($284) BookPlace DB50 sports a TFT-LCD screen with an LED backlight, a 1GHz Freescale i.MX535 processor, 8GB of internal flash memory and a microSD slot. The device also measures 120mm wide, 190mm tall, 11mm thick and weighs 330 grams (11.6 ounces), with battery life rated at up to 7.5 hours. Toshiba did not mention the operating system in its release though the hubbub in the Interwebs is that it will use customized versions of Linux and Android Gingerbread. The Japanese debut is pegged for February 10th and the company is apparently considering a release outside the country, too.
Toshiba Book Place full-color e-book store is powered by Blio, launches soon (video)
And here we go, an honest to goodness book store built around Ray Kurzweil's Blio e-reader software. It's been a long time coming and still it's only a teaser page, but Toshiba is promising to unleash its Book Place store "in the coming weeks" stocked with "thousands" of full-color e-books. The Blio software, you might remember from our video hands-on, offers a fully interactive reading experience rich in multimedia capabilities and should run beautifully on oh, say, Toshiba's new dual-screen Libretto W100. Man, when did Toshiba suddenly become interesting? See it in a cheesy, promotional packaging rager (that hints at an iOS app at the 2.42 mark) after the break.
