Two Dutch companies have recently introduced new E Ink based e-book readers. Irex, the Philips spin-off from Eindhoven, already has a remarkable device in its Iliad. Bigger and better than any other e-reader on the market, it is also twice as expensive. For the 650 euro that the Iliad costs you get an A5 screen, 16 greyscales, and Wifi though, making it an ideal device for students and businesses. For comparison: all other e-book readers have a screen half that size (A6), which makes reading A4 illustrated PDFs rather cumbersome.

But Irex must have felt that it was scaring people away at the bottom end of its market, and has now introduced the Iliad Book Edition at the considerably lower price of 500 euro. For that you get an Iliad without the Wifi and without a fancy protection cover.

A complete new player on the market is the BeBook from Endless Ideas in Utrecht, which looks pretty much like the offerings of Sony and Cybook. The BeBook costs 330 euros.

Another Philips spin-off, Polymer Vision, hopes to launch its foldable e-book reader Readius later this year.

E-book readers are devices that display electronic text files, and E Ink is a reflective screen technology that looks like paper.

Photo: lots of goodies come from the Eindhoven High Tech Campus. Source: Frank Lemmen, some rights reserved.