Worldwide shipments of eReaders will nearly triple from the 25 million expected to reach the market this year to 67 million eReaders by 2016.

The larger version of Amazon's Kindle e-reader is now available for order from more than a hundred countries around the world. And a price and on-sale date has been announced for the dual-screen competitor Alex.

Spring Design announced an agreement with Google that will make the more than one million Google Books accesible via the dual-screen Alex e-reader.

Barnes & Noble's announced that its new Nook e-reader is out of stock until 2010. The next projected shipping date is early next January.

Spring Design, developers of a dual-screen e-book reader called Alex, has filed suit against Barnes & Noble, alleging that B&N's new Nook reader uses Spring's trade secrets and violates the companies' non-disclosure agreement.

In less than three weeks the price Australians can expect to pay for a Kindle e-book has dropped from $314 to $280. If the $A achieves parity with the $US it could fall another $21 – leaving local Christmas shoppers literally hedging their bets about when to buy.

Hot on the heels of last week's rumors about a new dual-screen e-reader from Barnes & Noble, Spring Design has announced Alex, a device that pairs a black-and-white e-ink screen with a full-color LCD screen. The device offers Internet access as well as support for e-books. 

Bookstore giant Barnes & Noble is reportedly about to release an e-book reader to compete with Amazon's Kindle. The device is expected to make its debut on October 20, but possible photos have leaked out in the meantime.

Barnes & Noble, the world's largest bookseller, has launched the Barnes & Noble eBookstore offering 700,000 eBooks - plus half a million free, courtesy of Google - that can be downloaded and read on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Windows and Mac PCs and, exclusively, the forthcoming Plastic Logic eReader.