Thanks for your patience. We’re almost ready with our Alex store.
Keep checking in and by the first week of March you’ll be able to order your Alex online.  –The Spring Design Team

The Alex was originally supposed to go on sale in the latter part of February, but was then postponed until the first week of March.  The originally announced price of $399 has been dropped to $359. 

Spring Design’s new ereader should also be a available in Borders stores in a few months.

Update: Spring Design has indeed begun taking preorders for the Alex ereader.  Preorders will be shipped by April 14,  and the price is still $399 – not the $359 reported above.

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Plastic Logic announced that its upcoming ereader will be named the Que and will debut at the CES this coming January 7th in Las Vegas.  They released more photos, but nothing really new: only side views,  no views of the actual display.  In fact we see more of the hand model in the photo than we do of the Que.

The Que will have a screen size of 8.5 x 11 inches and will be mainly aimed at business users.  It will have an e-ink based touchscreen that will be shatterproof.  Supported formats include PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  AT&T will provide 3G connectivity, and Barnes and Noble will provide books for Plastic Logic’s upcoming ereader.  Wi-Fi is also indicated.

Irex also put out another press release about their upcoming DR800SG, which was supposed to become available at Best Buy Stores later this month.  The press release now says “later this fall”, so not sure if it will still be this month or not.

The DR800SG will also have a larger 8” screen and will be priced at $399.  AT&T will also provide the 3G connection for this ereader, and Barnes and Noble is providing the ebookstore.

A new ereader from Spring Design named Alex was also introduced today. This ebook reader also sports a smaller LCD screen below the e-ink display similar to that shown in leaked photos of Barnes and Noble’s  Athena which is expected to be unveiled  at B & N’s press conference tomorrow.  There is some speculation in fact that this is B & N’s new ereader, although the pictures look different.

Spring Design’s new ereader will feature a 6” e-ink screen and a 3.5” color LCD display.  Not exactly pocket-sized.  There is an SD card slot for added storage.  Spring Design says that the Alex will release to “selected strategic partners” by the end of this year.

The Alex is based on Google’s Android and will have full browser capabilities, so this ereader should work well with Google Editions.  It is more of a multimedia device though than current ereaders like the Kindle or Sony.  I can imagine it being very easy to get distracted from reading with this device.

“This is the start of a whole new experience of reading content on e-books, potentially igniting a whole new industry in multimedia e-book publishing for secondary authors to create supplementary content that is hyper linked to the text. We are bringing life to books with audio, video, and annotations,” said Dr. Priscilla Lu, CEO of Spring Design. “This gives readers the ability to fully leverage the resources on the Web, and the tools available in search engines to augment the reading experience.”

Meanwhile, back at the launching of the Amazon Kindle with US and International Wireless, it seems like more of a tempest in a teapot with little enough  thunder to go around.  Looking at Amazon’s websites outside of the US it would be hard to know that something “groundbreaking” was taking place.  The Kindle is not displayed on Amazon UK’s homepage, nor can it be found on the electronics or books category main pages.  It was also MIA at other Amazon international sites I looked at until I finally found it in Japan.  I guess if you are big in Japan……

It is increasingly looking as though the launch of Kindle International is aimed primarily at Americans travelling abroad.  It also seems as though the international release was a rushed job because of the competition from all of the recently announced new ereaders which will be coming to market soon.

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