Behind IREX's Partnership With Barnes & Noble: IREX's Kevin Hamilton on how the bookseller is helping his company go head-to-head with Amazon in the e-reader market.

So on our platform, with the wireless connection, we've set up several content providers and several content sellers. Barnes & Noble is one of them. But there are others as well that we'll be announcing shortly. The consumers can buy content wirelessly over the 3G network from those [providers]. Or, they could download content—free content, or paid content, or library content, for that matter—to their PC. And then, with a tethered cable, they can just drag it onto the device and read content that way, as well. ...

Extra: What will distinguish the IREX eReader from other readers?
Hamilton: On the device side, there's a couple of benchmarks on readers. One is screen size, and the other is connectivity. The Amazon Kindle is a 6-inch screen, and the IREX DR800 is an 8.1-inch screen. ... We're [increasing] the viewing area with about the same footprint. ... It still fits in your purse. ... We figure 60 percent of the buying population of these devices are women. ... The other differentiator ... is the connectivity. This is connected via a 3G network. ... Our device allows you to read anywhere, anytime, [and] buy content wirelessly. ...

Extra: What role does IREX expect to fill in the e-reader market with this device?
Hamilton: We've got a number of publishing partners at launch that we're going to be very happy to be with. … We'll have a number of newspapers, magazines—lots of periodical content. ... We envision that this is going to become a major consumer electronics category—that there won't be just a product, but that there will be many people with reading devices, and we hope to be one of the top two or three in the marketplace. ...

Extra: How will the e-book market change in the near future? In the long-term?
Hamilton: That's the crystal-ball question, isn't it? I think in the near future, we're clearly seeing a move toward a publishing format standard. It appears to be the .epub format. And just in the last six months, we've seen [many] publishers announce that they're going to just publish their digital content in .epub format, which has some advantages for formatting, layouts, reflowing text and things like that. So that's a good thing. [Previously], it was all over the map. Everybody had their own standard and their own format, and there was no one, clear industry standard. …