Engadget reports that Verizon is getting a pair of e-book reading devices—one 7”, one 10”—in September, and the name “Entourage” has been thrown around in connection with them. Are they going to be made by the company Entourage, currently known for the dual-screened Edge? Are they going to be dual-screened like the Edge, or just tablets? Nobody knows at this point.

On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different from the “Entourage” devices above, or did someone just get confused?

Another Engadget story (actually a reblogged PC World story) notes that the Windows 7 Hewlett Packard Slate—the one reported as “missing in action” by the where-are-they-now story we posted a few days ago—has reappeared in a hard-to-find page on HP’s website.

Back in November 2009, on the Android release of the Fictionwise eReader app, one of our readers remarked how odd it was that there was a Fictionwise eReader for Android but not a Barnes & Noble version. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Barnes & Noble is finally getting around to fixing that—or at least that a Barnes & Noble tweet says that an Android app is coming “real soon”.

Speaking of Barnes & Noble, I’m a few days late mentioning this, but last week B&N announced another weekly free e-book giveaway—but in this case, the books they will be giving away free are public-domain titles, which are already free via Project Gutenberg and other public domain book sites. eBookNewser quotes tweets from a number of notably unimpressed readers.

1 COMMENT

  1. The B&N Classics Series e-books are cleaned-up and neatly packaged versions of the classics, with:
    • New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars
    • Biographies of the authors
    • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
    • Footnotes and endnotes
    • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
    • Comments by other famous authors
    • Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations
    • Bibliographies for further reading
    • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
    • Some include illustrations of historical interest.
    (The list above is from B&N.)

    So B&N is giving readers the opportunity to get a nice e-book of the classic for the same free price that they can get a plain scanned e-book.

    The B&N Classics e-books used to sell for $1.99. Now they’re going for $2.99, so it looks like buyers are willingly paying a little bit for the extra quality and features of the e-book.

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