By NYU Staff

Credit: Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat

Forget the Kindle, the Nook, or whatever other cutesy names you may have in your e-reader arsenal — here comes the Intel Reader, powered by the  Atom chip.  The reader is just another development in the e-reader technological arms race, having come out November 10. But contrary to its bellicose-sounding chip, it’s meant to educate and help those with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.

The reader can “assist the estimated 55 million people in the U.S. who have dyslexia or other specific learning disabilities, or have vision problems such as low-vision or blindness, which makes reading printed words difficult or impossible.”

It’s an e-reader with a heart?

Maybe… until you look at the price tag: $1,500 a pop versus $259 for the Barnes and Noble Nook, or Amazon’s Kindle 2. And at some 30 seconds to process a standard page of text, it’s slow.

Coming down the pipeline, Intel plans to trick out new Atoms with a peripheral device called the Portable Capture Station, “which looks a bit like a slimmed-down overhead projector and is designed to make it easier to shoot images of many pages quickly,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

And to make things even more complicated in its pursuit of a competitive e-reader, Intel had to pay out a whopping $1.2 billion to Advanced Micro Devices after a bitter antitrust legal battle, which was settled in the same week it unveiled its e-reader.   Along with the huge chunk of change, Intel has to re-access how it goes about its business.

To throw another monkey wrench into the mess, Intel may still be subjected to regulatory scrutiny for the way it did business in the chip market.

The stock market reacted positively to the news. Intel’s stock was down 0.96% to $19.65 in late-afternoon trading on November 12.

Bombs away…

To read more:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/09/intel-introduces-a-digital-book-reader-for-the-blind/

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/10/intel-offers-an-e-reader-with-a-difference/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq8moeOGAXw