New eBook device coming later this year

by Dennis Sellers, MacCentral  

eBookAd.com, an eBook (electronic book) portal, is teaming up with Seoul-based Korea ebook, to prepare for the introduction of the Hiebook, an eBook device, into the North American market.

The Hiebook will initially support Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME and NT. Support for Mac OS is currently under development, according to Dustin Revin of eBookAd.com.

The Hiebook, combines an XML based, OEB-compliant eBook reader, an MP3 player, a digital audio recorder, PDA functions, and games into one item. For eBook content, it will use a new format, "hiebook Reader." However, eBookAd reps say this format complies with the Open eBook (OEB) publication standard, meaning that publishers who have already developed OEB content should have an easy time preparing it for download and display on the Hiebook.

The device is designed from the ground up for reading eBooks -- it sports a 5.6-inch diagonal backlit touch screen LCD capable of displaying text and graphics at a resolution of 320 X 480 pixels. The 10.5-ounce Hiebook, will ship in the U.S. and Canada later this year with 16MB of flash ROM, plus an additional 2MB of RAM, according to eBookAd Executive Vice President Dustin Revin. The memory can be expanded to 128MB.

What's more, a suite of tools and services will be available that will empower authors and publishers to make their content available, Revin said. Content sellers will have the ability to deliver titles directly over the Internet, which can be sent to the Hiebook through its built-in USB port. An SDK (software development kit) will be available enabling individuals or companies to develop applications and games that will interface with or run on the Hiebook.

eBookAd.com is an eBook portal featuring a search engine where visitors can find over 10,000 eBooks from more than 400 publishers. The site's news archive includes a searchable collection of eBook articles, as well as original audio interviews. Korea ebook is an eBook company that's developing and supplying the Hiebook, and the accompanying publishing solution, Xbuilder. Korea ebook first showed off a prototype of the Hiebook at the NIST eBook 2000 meeting in Washington, D.C. last October.