Sony has recently announced the release date for their next generation e-Book. The new Sony Reader will be available beginning October 1st and will be launched along with an exclusive online e-book service called Connect. The site is actually already up and running, but you can't buy anything just yet though Sony expects to offer 10,000 titles from publishing companies like News Corp., HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.

As for the device itself, it features a 6-inch E Ink greyscale screen capable of displaying up to a 800x600 resolution, expandable memory through Memory Sticks, and file support besides Sony's own e-book format like PDFs, documents, feeds and JPEGs. One thing that caught my attention was the E Ink screen technology description, from Sony's website: "(...) a reading experience that's similar to paper - high contrast, high resolution, viewable in direct sunlight and at a nearly 180-degree angle, and requiring no power to maintain the image." The Sony Reader will carry a $349.99 price tag.