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Entourage Opens e-Book Store

Mclean, Va. – Entourage, the company planning to
introduce a $490 combination e-reader/netbook at International CES in January,
announced today the opening of an e-book store to complement the device.

The e-book store at www.entourage.com
will include more than 1 million free e-books in the public domain (digitized
by Google) and hundreds of thousands of trade and professional e-book titles
from Ingram Digital, plus thousands of consumer books, newspapers and
periodicals from Libre Digital.

The e-reader, called the Edge by Entourage Systems, will be sold
through retailers and is aimed at students and anyone who must carry around a
lot of documents, said Doug Atkinson marketing and business development VP for
Entourage.

First announced in late October, the Edge runs on the Android
operating system. It opens like a book with a 9.7-inch monochrome E-Ink screen
on one side for e-reading and a 10.1-inch color LCD touchscreen on the opposing
side for netbook functions, including email and instant messaging, Web
browsing, video and audio. It provides access to EPUB and PDF books and
magazines.

The device offers Wi-Fi access out of the box with a 3G wireless option,
whose details will be announced at CES.

Users can read e-books on one side and take notes, highlight text
or draw diagrams on the margins on the E-Ink screen, and those annotations will
remain on the e-book page when you return to it.  Also, users can link video or Web pages to
the e-book text so that teachers, for example, may create new multimedia
materials for students who also have an Edge device. 

Students can also highlight a chart on the e-book side and it
will appear in color on the netbook side.

Analysts claimed winning over the student market is critical for
e-readers to reach mass-market status.

Entourage said it opted for the dual-screen e-reader/netbook
approach “because we were trying to understand how someone learns and
works.  The user typically has many
things going on at once,” said Atkinson.

He explained, “If I found a Web page, I can attach it to the
document, I can attach a movie, an audio link … And the next time I go back to
that text, those links will appear.  If
you want to make a multimedia book with our device, you can do that.”

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