BeBook Promises To Rival Amazon's Kindle And Sony's Reader

Electronic readers could well be one of the more popular products in 2009 fuelled by new models from Amazon as well as a more relaxed approach by book publishers.

Pocketlint has revealed that Dutch company, Endless Ideas, will bring a next generation eBook reader called BeBook to the CeBIT tech show which will be held in a few days.

The model is set to offer wireless connectivity, touchscreen capabilities and ePub DRM standard. BeBook currently offers its reader for £249.99 while the Amazon Kindle 2 costs roughly £252 (and is not available outside the US).

However, the former comes with a whopping 20,000 free ebooks to start with and can read a much wider range of formats (PDF, MP3, Word, Text and Html).

It is also smaller than the Kindle while having the same reading surface area and there's a SD card slot that can be quite useful to complement the 512MB memory onboard; that said, it can't read Kindle's proprietary format and does not have a keyboard.

I4U also reports about another potential competitor to the Kindle and Sony's reader; the Boox eReader, manufactured in China by Onyx International will have a touchscreen with sizes going up to 9.7-inch, roughly equivalent to the latest Netbook screens.

The feature list reads likes a wish list for a touchscreen netbook: a 400MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 512MB Flash, SD Slot, USB 2.0, 2.5mm headphone port, WiFi, 3G, GPRS and much more. No pricing and availability details have been leaked out yet.

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