Kindle competitor Irex adds Verizon, Best Buy as partners |
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Kindle competitor Irex adds Verizon, Best Buy as partners
Dutch company Irex Technologies, which is working on an electronic reader for the U.S. market to compete with Amazon's Kindle, is looking more interesting all the time. The company earlier announced a partnership with bookseller Barnes & Noble, giving it access to a large selection of digital book content. Now Irex is teaming up with Verizon, which will power 3G wireless downloads of books for the device, and with retail chain Best Buy, which will carry the Irex reader in some stores.
Irex said Best Buy will start selling its reader, called DR800SG, later this fall. It's priced at $399, which is on the pricier end of the current e-reader market (Amazon has a $299 Kindle 2 and a $489 Kindle DX, while Sony has three new readers hitting the market at $399, $299 and $199). The Irex reader sports an 8.1-inch E-Ink display with touch screen capability. It looks like Irex is following the Kindle model of including the cost of wireless downloads in the upfront retail price of the device.
Irex will also support the open electronic book format known as ePub, which allows for reading across multiple devices. The ePub format, which has been embraced by Sony, Google and others, is emerging as challenge for Amazon, which has a proprietary format for reading books on Kindle.
Just who is Irex? It's a spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics that developed one of the earliest e-readers, the Iliad. It's not exactly a household name in the U.S., though Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wries that Irex has a "successful B2B eReader business in Europe that sells in the ten-thousands of eReaders per month to businesses in the aviation, government, education, and publishing industries."
The Irex deal is an interesting move for Verizon, which has watched competitors Sprint and AT&T form key partnerships in the electronic reader market (Sprint with Kindle, and AT&T with Sony and Plastic Logic). Best Buy could be a key retail channel for Irex, depending on how many stores carry the reader.
The New York Times reports that Barnes & Noble and Irex talked about putting B&N's brand on the Irex e-reader, but couldn't reach agreement. Barnes & Noble doesn't have its own dedicated e-reader, at least yet, though it does have a partnership with the soon-to-be-released reader from Silicon Valley firm Plastic Logic.
Looks like the universe of e-books -- which we're attempting to map here at TechFlash -- is expanding yet again.
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