The Foxit eSlick reader, manufactured by the same folks that build the Kindle for Amazon, has finally made its way to market. It looks pretty good, considering that it’s probably the cheapest e-ink reader available.

Release was originally slate for January, but preorders are just finding their way to customers now. Furthermore, anyone whoorders a reader now will probably have to wait a few more weeks to get their hands on one of these $260 no-frills units. [via gizmodo]

Samsung’s announcement that it plans to release an e-book reader called Papyrus means it is at least the seventh company to hop on the digital-book bandwagon.With touchscreen capability and an e-ink screen, the Papyrus will cost just $300, Samsung says, making it even cheaper than the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.

Papyrus appears to be a full fledged PDA, with all sorts of little applications that reminded us of the original Palm Pilots back in the day. The screen is about five inches, with a touch screen display. Writing on the screen and selecting icons have a slight lag, but no worse than most first generation Palm Pilots. It’s a ton faster than the Sony PRS-707 and the iRex Iliad when it comes to touch screen technology.

The real selling point for the Papyrus will be combining the long battery life of e-paper with the power of a PDA. A lot of people are speculating that Samsung will eventually add wireless connectivity to the Papyrus, but so far it uses USB cables for bringing information to and from a computer. [via epapercentral, wired]

PocketBook is a Ukraine based Netronix distributor similar to Bookeen. The reader software they ported is FBReader, and they just announced that they will support an open source project called PocketBook Free. [via mobileread]

Google will provide Sony with some 500,000 copyright-expired titles for its e-book Reader, giving both companies the chance to take jabs at Amazon and Kindle. Sony can claim that it has a much-larger library and is more open; Google gets prime placement at the Sony eBook store and a boost in positive (it hopes) publicity for Google Book Search. Each is emphasizing open platform, a dig at Amazon and its proprietary Kindle format. Take this statement from Steve Haber, president of the Digital Reading Business Division at Sony Electronics: “We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible - from our store or others - whether that content is purchased, borrowed or free.” And this from Google’s Adam Smith: “We believe in an open platform for accessing and reading books, and we’re excited to partner with Sony to help bring these public domain books to more people.” 

Amazon has been building its sale catalog steadily since Kindle’s launch—to more than 245,000 as of today, compared with Sony’s 100,000 or so. Sony now can boast that it offers more than 600,000. With the electronic readers priced in a similar range (Sony’s PRS-505 is about $300 and a price cut today puts its PRS-700 model slightly less then Kindle at $350), including the free books might sound like an advantage to Sony—especially in these frugal days. But the Kindle as a device isn’t a walled garden. [via paidcontent]

Fujitsu are ready to ship their e-reader, and promises 40 hours of continuos use. The unit can be operated by its touchscreen or the assortment of function buttons. Naturally you can do the regular e-book thing, but the Japanese version of the device also includes full-on Windows CE 5.0, which would probably be a bit of a chore to use with the relatively slow screen refresh times of e-ink (1.8 seconds for a single wipe), but undeniably retrofuturistic. FLEPia ships on April 20th in Japan for 99,750 Yen (about $1,010 US).

 [via fujitsu]

Brother Japan have announced a “document reader”, the SV-100B, intended for displaying ebooks and technical documentation.  The Brother SV-100B, unlike other ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle 2 or Pixelar E-Reader, has an LCD rather than e-ink display, measuring 9.7-inches and running at 1,200 x 825 150dpi resolution.

Despite not using the power-frugal e-ink, the SV-100B still manages 83hrs of battery life from a single charge.  You can also swap out the battery for a second one, should you really need extended runtime.  While there’s no internal storage, you can fit 10,000 A4 pages on the included 2GB microSD card. [via slashgear]

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much innovation going on. It looks like a rebadged version of the Netronix reader. [via engadget]