If you want to instill a love of reading in your child early on, this may be a good way to do so. Disney’s new range of eBooks will feature a “Disney-level experience” according to the company. These eBooks feature a “look and listen” section for beginners, where the book will be read aloud by voice actors to a soundtrack and each word will be highlighted as it is being spoken.

That should learn them kids. If your child wants to read alone and finds a word he or she doesn’t recognize, they just click on it and a voice will read it to them. It’s a great visual way for kids to learn.

IREX is introducing its DR800SG e-reader. It may look like the Kindle, but it isn’t. The screen measures 8.1 inches diagonal and the controls are a stylus/touchscreen combo along with a control bar on the side that works sort of like a joystick. Also, the IREX renders newspapers with page layout intact, allowing readers to zoom in on articles.

The device has an always-on 3G connection via Verizon (Don’t worry. No subscription fees). The company has also partnered with Barnes & Noble for their e-book store, selling most new books at $9.99. No PC is required, but the syncing software is Windows only. The DR800SG should be available at Best Buy stores in October for $399.

We first told you about Bookeen’s Cybus ebook reader back in may. Then it was briefly spotted in July. After that nothing. So we figured they gave up on their expensive e-book with no Wi-Fi.

Well, it’s back and now shipping. For the price, at least it looks different than other readers. The E-ink ebook reader weighs just 5.3oz and features a 5″ display, 12 font sizes, 4-level greyscale and 200 dpi and the built in accelerometer lets you auto change from portrait to landscape mode.

Here’s an interesting eBook from Asus dubbed the eee-Book, sporting two color displays that lets you flip the pages like you would on a real book. Think of it as a large Nintendo DS on it’s side. You can also browse the web on one of the displays, presumably while reading on the other.

It connects using 3G or Wifi, comes with a memory card slot and supports Skype audio/video conferencing. The price is a really nice $165. Look out Kindle! That’s about all the info we have right now, but we like what we see.

EReaders are starting to really take off thanks to the Amazon Kindle. The big catch is that most of the readers on the market lack the key Kindle feature that makes it so popular, namely wireless connectivity.

Astak has announced a new 5-inch Pocket Pro eReader that will retail for $199. That sub-$200 range is thought to be the sweet spot for eReaders. The device also supports Adobe DRM PDF files along with 20 other open source formats. The 5-inch screen supports 8-levels of gray scale.

We now have some images and specs on a couple of new Sony e-book readers, the PRS-300 and PRS-600. The PRS-300 has a 5″ LCD display without audio output, and it will also lack a memory card slot. But you do have 440MB of storage space.

The PRS-600 is the better model, equipped with a 6″ touchscreen display along with audio output and an SD/MS memory card slot. You also get 380MB of storage space. We don’t know if they have Wi-Fi yet, which is what we really want to know.

Barnes & Noble, the ginormous US book store chain has just announced its very own eBookStore. And as you might expect from a heavy literary retail hitter like B&N, they are doing things big. It already features some 700,000 eBooks. According to them, that’s the largest eBook store ever.

And you can bet that they expect that selection to grow quickly. The company also announced a partnership with Plastic Logic, which is an eBook manufacturer and says that they will be catering to every platform.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for a proper Kindle 2 knock-off, the Chinese have answered your prayers with this one that looks just like the Kindle. The device will arrive in Japan by the end of 2009, and the price tag will be around $210. The device will have a built-in cellular modem with SIM card.

The company, Peking University Founder, offered no further specs, but we would really like them to explain just what the hell their name means. Shady gadgets, shady names. I suppose they want to make you feel safe, as if the founder of Peking University endorses this thing.

Bookeen was apparently showing off their pocket ebook reader, the Cybook Opus, and those who have seen it sound pretty pleased. The ebook reader has a display of 200dpi with 600 x 800 resolution and auto-rotation.

It supports file formats like ePUB and PDF, DRM or no. It comes with 1GB of internal storage that can be expanded via the microSD memory card slot. The large page-turn buttons on the side make sense, and it supports up to a dozen font sizes.

Jointech has announced their new JE100 ebook reader, a 7-inch device that uses an LCD touchscreen instead of an e-ink display. Based on Windows CE 5.0, the Jointech JE100 will not only boast Mobipocket Reader, MSReader and eReader support, but also likely play back video and audio files together with viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents.

Inside it features a 400MHz CPU, 128MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. Transflash cards up to 4GB in capacity can be used to boost storage, and it rocks two USB ports: one a host, for plugging in external peripherals and the other a slave, for hooking up the JE100 to a computer where it presumably mounts as an external drive.

E-reader maker iRex promises to deliver a high-tech color, writable ebook reader by 2011. They claim that this device would have a brightness level three times that of the existing additive color electrophoretic displays, thanks to a system of subtractive color mixing.

Subtractive e-ink technology is compared to physical printing whereby colors act as filters to absorb portions of white light striking them and reflect back the desired hue. The additive system mixes together backlit or illuminated colors to create hues, often requiring filters that can reduce overall quality.

Here’s an e-book reader that does things that the Kindle 2 won’t. Like fit in your pocket and have built in PDF support. The reader weighs in at just 5.3 ounces and packs a nice resolution of 200 DPI. Some other features include a 6″ display, 1GB of flash memory that can accommodate ePub, PDF, HTML and text formats. You’ll also have access to a catalog of 150,000 books.

Software features would let users pick one of 12 font sizes for readability as well as let owners organize e-books by folders. Battery life will give you about 8,000 page flips, which is quite a few novels(Or one Robert Jordan Wheel Of Time novel.) No 3G wireless feature, but you’ll get 21 days at standby.

Here’s yet another E-Book contender. Much Cool-er than the Kindle if it’s name and fancy color is any indication. The Cool-er is by Neil Jones, an avid reader and entrepreneur. It boasts a larger selection of titles and will target an early June release date.

How many titles? It comes complete with 260,000 paid-for titles at launch from all the major publishers. 60,000 of those will be available in the UK and Europe initially. You also get a choice of eight different colors and languages for the Coo-ler.

One of the Kindle’s drawbacks is that it has no color screen. That may soon change if Bridgestone has anything to say about it. This is the best attempt yet at a color e-paper screen. It’s still experimental, but this 13-inch color e-paper screen even accepts pen input. Better then that, the screen refresh rate is quick. Only 0.8 seconds.

Those are some nice advancements. But it isn’t ready for prime time just yet. Right now the panel is noticeably dim, with little contrast and we’re assuming that battery life leaves something to be desired. But color e-paper screens are getting closer to being enjoyed in our everyday lives.

Peer pressure. It affects companies too. And since everyone else is getting in on the e-book reader craze, why not Barnes & Noble too? That’s the rumor anyway. Why wouldn’t they want a slice of that action? Some “insiders” have supposedly been talking about the possibility.

Just like the Kindle, it would supposedly be connected to a cellular carrier for some connectivity. According to one mysterious someone, Barnes & Noble had been in talks with Verizon, but that didn’t pan out. Now it would seem that Sprint is a possibility. Some aren’t ruling out AT&T.