Amazon E-Book & Google Bookstore

NY Times has an article this morning on Amazon's $400 e-Book reader. It will be wireless and will come with some free content.

Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer. They also say Amazon will pack some free offerings onto the device, like reference books, and offer customers a choice of subscriptions to feeds from major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the French newspaper Le Monde. The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device.

Also as has been rumored for a while, Google plans to sell full access to some of the book titles in its Book Search product.

For its part, Google has no plans to introduce an electronic device for reading books. Its new offering will allow users to pay some portion of a book’s cover price to read its text online. For the last two years, as part of the Google Book Search Partner Program, some publishers have been contributing electronic versions of their books to the Google database, with the promise that the future revenue would be shared.

Steve Riggio is quoted at the end of the article say in part that B&N will increase the number of e-Book titles they sell and will consider the sale of a B&N reader only when the unit price comes down to a reasonable level. Horray for that.