A New e-Reader Comes on the Market

Monday's Publishers Weekly had a story on the launch of yet another e-reading device.

Called the Ditto Book for Digital Interface Total Text Organizer (yuck!), the e-reader sells for $249.

Like the Kindle, The Ditto Book has a 6-inch black & white e-ink screen; long battery life and can read both text and PDF as well as play MP3 sound files. On the other hand, . . . the Ditto Book offers an expandable SD card slot that kicks its memory up to 2 GB of storage.

Unlike the Kindle, the Ditto Book is not wireless; users will need to download e-books first to their computer and then to the e-reader.

. . . the Ditto Book supports epub format titles, the industry's open e-publishing format standard and the format in which most e-books will be published going forward.

I'm still waiting for the release of the Plastic Logic e-reading device, which is due out in early 2010. According to Wikipedia:

It is intended as a replacement for paper, allowing electronic documents to be transported and read just like paper documents. It will have a thickness of less than 7 mm, a form factor of 8.5" x 11" and a weight of less than 16 oz. It will be capable of displaying MS office documents (Excel, PowerPoint, Word), PDF files and others.