With the e-reader trend apparently catching on, a number of well-established as well as new companies, including Asian manufacturers, are making a foray into the e-reader arena – a fact that was more

than evident at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

By far, the ‘most crowded’ section at the CES event happened to be the e-reader section, with buyers and customers thronging the section to take a peek at the e-readers displayed at the various stalls.

While new brands names, like Copia, Hanvon, Bookeen and Jetbook, marked their debut at the CES event, some of the promising new e-readers that were unveiled included - the Que e-reader from Plastic

Logic; Skiff e-reader from Hearst Corp.; Spring Design’s e-reader; and Entourage Systems eDGe device.

The key difference between the existing e-readers - like market leading Amazon Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook – and most of the recently-unveiled prototypes is that while the former use E-Ink

displays, most of the latter use LCD screens similar to the ones used in standard notebooks.

Nonetheless, despite the unveiling of an array of new e-reader prototypes at the CES, analysts are of the opinion that most of the unveiled devices would hardly pose any substantial competition to the

Amazon Kindle – the reason, as put by Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, being that most of these devices “won't be in the market for months.”