Sony's new eBook readers

Sony is taking the price battle to Amazon. The company has announced two new additions to its eReader family, Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition.

The Reader Pocket Edition is priced at $199, making it a third lesser than the price of the basic Kindle model from Amazon.com. The Reader Touch Edition is priced at $299.

Both the eReaders will be available in the market by the end of August.

The Reader Pocket Edition sports a five-inch electronic paper display and is available in a navy blue, rose and silver. The device can store about 350 standard eBooks and provides up to two weeks of reading enjoyment on a single battery charge.

The Reader Touch Edition features a menu-driven six-inch touch screen panel that enables navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen.

Users can take handwritten notes with the stylus pen or type with the virtual keyboard. The Reader Touch Edition includes an onboard Oxford American English Dictionary.

The Touch Edition also offers five adjustable font sizes, as well as expansion slots for both Memory Stick PRO Duo and SD card. It comes in red, black or silver colours.

Both models feature an E Ink Vizplex electronic paper display that mimics the look of ink on paper. Sony's eBook Library software 3.0, now includes support for many Apple Macintosh computers as well as PCs and makes easier transfer and reading any Adobe PDF (with reflow capability), Microsoft Word, BBeB files, or other text file formats.