Sony ReaderAnnounced at CES earlier this week was the new Sony Reader.

It's an electronic book that uses ePaper to display pages. The benefit of this is that electrical power is only needed to write the page once. So you're only actually using batteries when you turn the page. You can leave the thing sitting on your bedside table for a month, showing the page you're up to, and it'll have the same battery life left in it when you come back to it.

Apparently the internal battery gives you something like 7,500 page-turns, and the reader can store up to 80 books. It'll also play MP3s etc, but that sucks power obviously. Here's the features & specs page.

Richard Campbell on this week's Mondays said that one of the reviewers at CES asked the Sony representative when they were going to see any actual product, rather than a prototype. He thought that someone had simply mounted a printed piece of paper under the screen, rather than showing the actual display. That's how good it looks.

It sounds like it might be expensive ... but still ... I think I'd actually read more if I had one of these babies.