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Sony today announced that it will sell a wireless eReader device for $399 by Christmas. The Reader Daily Edition will be powered by AT&T's 3G network. That in itself is interesting news, especially given that Barnes & Noble announced a similar device in partnership with Irex yesterday. What's gotten somewhat lost in all the excitement about the hardware, however, is that Sony has also partnered with a number of independent booksellers in the US. These include over 200 members of the American Booksellers Association, as well as BooksOnBoard, Net Galley, and Portland, OR-based Powell's Books, the world's largest independent bookseller. In addition, Sony also plans to make it easier for users to check out eBooks from their local libraries.

When it comes to eReaders, Amazon's Kindle is obviously the largest player in the U.S., with Sony's eReader being a distant second. A few days ago, though, we got a chance to talk to Hans Brons, the CEO of iRex. IRex is a company worth watching closely, as it is a spin-off from the e-ink research group at Philips that developed the screen technology that is being used by most current generation eBook readers. Philips decided that it didn't want to pursue this line of research in 2005 and decided to license the technology to other vendors.

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

The day after you bought that Kindle 2 last week, Jeff Bezos was on a stage announcing a whole new Kindle: the DX, with a larger screen, support for PDFs and a free pony with every purchase. (The screen isn't the only thing that's larger - have a look at the price tag.)

The size increase will go over well with people who need a big canvas - students using the Kindle to read textbooks are a big target audience for the DX. But I can't help but wonder if the newest Kindle is heading in the wrong direction. Portability, after all, is one of the device's most dazzling charms; Kindles 1 and 2 are about the size of a trade paperback, and smaller than most hardcovers.

During a recent conference call, Rupert Murdoch announced that he plans to fix the current newspaper business model by charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper web sites. News Corp's Wall Street Journal, of course, is one of the few newspaper sites in the United States that is still hides a lot of its content behind a paywall (though that wall is starting to crumble as well). The WSJ did, indeed, see some small revenue gains in the last few months while the rest of its competitors saw their daily circulation take a nosedive.

During an event in New York City this morning, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, unveiled a larger version of the company's successful Kindle eBook reader. The new device, the Kindle DX, has a 9.7" display that is about two and a half times larger than that of the Kindle 2. The Kindle DX will come with a built-in PDF reader, and features an auto-rotate mode, so that readers can easily switch between reading in portrait and landscape modes. The Kindle DX will cost $489 and is scheduled to ship this summer.