MS Reader Released this week

This week Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited PC version of MS Reader. (www.microsoft.com/reader) At the same time Barnes & Noble.com opened a new section of its web-site listing 2000 new and classic titles available for purchase and download for MS Reader from a range of major publishers such as including Simon & Schuster, Time Warner Trade Publishing, and Random House. Barnes & Noble.com has said that it will add 150 new titles to the site every week. http://www.bn.com/ebook/ For the next week bn.com is offering free downloads of 100 of the world's great classics - from Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities' to Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' - as an incentive for people to enter and embrace the world of eBooks.

Ironically, those customers who bought the Pocket PC will find that these editions are not readable on their appliances. The devices, such as the Hewlett-Packard Jornada 545 and the Casio Cassiopeia E-115, debuted in April and come pre-loaded with Version 1.0 of Reader. This version cannot display eBooks with advanced security like those that will be on sale at Barnes & Noble.com. No date has been announced when the patch will be available to Pocket PC users.

Reader's onscreen interface, designed mainly for use on LCD screens, emulates the pages of a paper book and is designed to make extended eBook reading more comfortable and rewarding. The main innovation behind Reader is ClearType, a system that effectively increases screen resolution by modulating the brightness of the red, blue, and green elements within each pixel. This makes the edges of certain onscreen typefaces appear smoother.

Simon & Schuster unveiled this week 'Star Trek S.C.E.,' a new series of electronic-only Star Trek novels following the adventures of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. The first installment, 'Star Trek S.C.E. Book One: The Belly of the Beast' by veteran Star Trek author Dean Wesley Smith, will be available first for Microsoft Reader and later for other formats such as the Rocket eBook. For a limited time, all five of these Simon & Schuster eBooks will be offered for a special promotional price of $1 to the first 20,000 people who purchase each eBook in the "Star Trek" series.

Simon & Schuster, in its second major eBook release of the day, announced that Senator Joseph Lieberman's recent book 'In Praise of Public Life' will be sold as an eBook starting immediately. Lieberman, named August 7 as Vice President Al Gore's running mate, uses the book to defend the idea of public service at a time of widespread disillusionment with

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