enTourage eDGe eReader Covered [New eReader Features Dual Screens, Academia Focus, Runs Android]

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The world needs more eReaders like it needs more horrible natural disasters, but this new one from enTourage is aiming for a specific niche. The enTourage eDGe will have dual screens, a color one and a monochrome one along with several book deals with text book publishers.

enTourage is aiming for the college market with this product. As said earlier, they’ve signed a bunch of deals with academic text providers, including McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press and John Wiley & Sons. All of these will be out for purchase via eDGe book store, which will be the vehicle for getting content onto the eReader.

As for the device, it’s being called a “dualbook” by those in the blogging press. It will have a 9.7-inch E Ink monochrome touchscreen on one side, and a 10.1-inch LCD touchscreen on the other side. The screens will be able to rotate around, which I assume will give it a tablet-like form.

For an input device, you can either choose to use a stylus on the E Ink display, or use the LCD touchscreen as… well a touchscreen, or bring up a virtual keyboard. The device will have 4GB of storage, or roughly 3000 textbooks. It’ll read ePub and PDF file formats.

For software, it’s running a heavily modified version of Android. The device will also playback music and video formats, which might be a mistake, since Johnny College Student might be tempted to load up pirated copies of Family Guy instead of his new Biology textbook.

While it is definitely a bit different than both the Kindle or the iPad, it will be compared to both. It’ll have the same $500 price as the iPad, which is considerably more than the Kindle. At any rate, their aim at academia is a new market approach, and it’ll be interesting to see if they have any success. The enTourage eDGe is now being pre-ordered and will ship next month.