Sony's Upcoming Reader Refresh To Have Touchscreen E Ink Display

Sony looks set to re-launch its presence in the e-reader space. (Is that an artificial enough sentence for you?) The company, which has clearly mastered PowerPoint, plans to release new e-readers with a new E Ink-developed display. And yes, that display will be a touchscreen display.

There’s no release date set, but you’d have to figure the new readers aren’t too far off if Sony’s producing material such as this—the picture, I mean.

Besides the new display, which is the main attraction, obviously, Sony’s said to have improved the battery life and added an instant translation dictionary. Presumably you’d be able to download non-English books then have them automatically machine translated. That’s probably not the best way to read a foreign book—translation is more than merely matching word-for-word—but it’s neat nonetheless.

But if that display does, in fact, end up being a touchscreen, that will be… well, not huge, but it’s certainly better than having an unsightly hardware keyboard alongside the the bottom.