Tags: technology

With support from several prominent American partners, Philips spinoff IREX Technologies entered the U.S. e-book market yesterday when it unveiled a device intended to compete directly with the Kindle and the Sony Reader. The IREX DR800SG, which features 3G wireless connectivity through Verizon and access to the recently launched Barnes & Noble eBookstore, will land in Best Buy stores late next month.

In a bid to position itself alongside social networking phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, online publishing service Scribd unveiled a host of new social features yesterday. Users can now create personal reading lists, connect with those who share similar interests, and subscribe to instant updates from favorite authors, publishers, and even other readers.

Yet another contender entered the rapidly crowding e-book market yesterday when electronics giant Samsung announced the South Korean debut of its first e-book reader, the SNE-50K. The six-and-a-half-ounce device, which will retail for the equivalent of about $270, is not expected to reach the American market until 2010. 

Between January and April, Oxford University Press added 1.5 million public “tweets” to its Oxford English Corpus, a vast electronic database that collects examples of words in context. Among the findings: Language use on Twitter tends to focus on the self and the present, while the social networking service’s insistence on brevity gives rise to some creative solutions.