The enTourage eDGe (and its irritatingly random capitalisation) was one of the surprise hits of last year’s CES: a dual-screen eBook reader with a 9.7in e-paper display on one side and a 10.1in LCD screen on the other.

This year the company is back with the Pocket eDGe – a smaller and much more practical alternative to its ground-breaking forebear.

The right-hand side acts as a touchscreen tablet running Google’s Android. Its 7in colour touchscreen boasts a resolution of 800 x 480, and it’s an impressively vibrant, responsive display at that.

The left-hand side is devoted to eBook duties, sporting a smaller 6in e-Ink display. It’s touch-sensitive too, although it only responds to prods from the accompanying stylus, not fingers.

Its 800 x 600 resolution is exactly the same as the latest Amazon Kindle, but eBook text doesn’t look as precisely defined as it does on our A-List topper. However, the ability to jot handwritten annotations on eBooks is handy, even if the e-Ink screen is characteristically sluggish to respond to swishes of the stylus.

The inclusion of Android makes this far more than eBook reader, of course. There’s a full web browser, that was impressively nippy and responsive in our brief tests on the enTourage stand. There’s no 3G, however, so you’re reliant on 802.11bg Wi-Fi.

The 3GB of internal storage can also be used to store music, a smattering of video and your eBook purchases, and there’s a microSD slot on the side if you need to bolster that rather paltry storage, plus a USB port that supports external drives.

There’s decent integration between the two sides of the device, too. Click on a link in an eBook and it immediately opens in the tablet’s browser. Likewise, purchase a book from the store on the tablet and it pops open on the e-Ink screen on the left.

The device itself looks and feels a little plasticky, and an 11-hour battery life in eBook mode is no match for the Kindle, which lasts for weeks at a time. If you use the colour screen, battery life drops to six hours.

But if you’re looking for an eBook reader with something extra, our first impressions suggest that the Pocket eDGe deserves a place on your shortlist at the very least.  The Pocket eDGe costs 399 Euros from eBookreaderdiscounter.com.

The big news is touch has been introduced across the range, and the key thing to note is that Sony has done away with the old resistive overlay, which made the previous Touch reader such a poor reading device – the layer introduced glare and made it uncomfortable to read, particularly outdoors.

The new touchscreens use infrared sensors built into the the screen bezel, a bit like the optical technology used in Sony’s all-in-one PCs, and that means you get to enjoy the next generation E-Ink Pearl screen in all its “naked” glory, while being able to flick pages back and forth with your finger, double tap words to get definition from the built-in dictionary and even take handwritten notes with the memo app and stylus. It worked well too, requiring only the faintest brush to turn pages, select zoom levels or bring a book up for reading.

Both screens boast the same old resolution as before (600 x 800) – one 5in the other 6in – but Sony claims they have a whiter background and increased contrast. It’s clearly a big improvement and nearly as good the new Amazon Kindle’s screen, as a quick side-by-side test at the event revealed. Sony provided samples of its rival for comparison.

Both also sport 2GB of internal storage, improved 10,000 page-turn batteries, and are lighter and slimmer than their predecessors. But what the new models don’t have is any kind of wireless connectivity. The prices are high too. You can pre-order the Pocket from Waterstones for £160 and the Touch for £200 and the devices go on sale officially from September 17.

What intrigued me at least as much as the new hardware though, was the announcement of Sony’s two-pronged attempt to lure readers away from the charms of the huge Amazon bookstore. With Sony eBook readers it’s no longer just about the hardware.

The first part of this is Sony has hatched a deal with Google to place a custom search of Google books on the Sony website, opening an estimated 500,000 titles up for quick and easy download. Google’s standard book search doesn’t let you filter results in this way, so finding titles you can take away on an eBook has, up until now, been a hit and miss affair.

The second, and more interesting development, is support for free eBook loans from local authority libraries, a feature the Amazon Kindle doesn’t support. If you’re lucky enough to be a member of a local library supporting the service (50 have signed up so far – here’s a full list) you’ll be able to visit its website, tap your library card number in and borrow any book in the eBook catalogue, for free, for a period of 14 or 21 days.

The odd thing about this is it works in a very similar way to the good old bricks-and-mortar library. While a title is out on loan, it’s unavailable to others to borrow (unless the library has purchased multiple copies); it only becomes available again once the loan period expires and the book removes itself from your reader.

To be fair, this isn’t something exclusive to Sony; other readers which support the DRM technology needed can also be used to borrow books in this way, and owners of older Sony readers will also benefit. It’s also clear that the system’s still in its early days: on my local authority website I found only 398 titles available for loan.

But with Sony’s huge presence in the eBook reader market, and the new ability to borrow books as well as download old ones for free, it could very well herald a turning point for eBooks in general. All that’s needed now is for local libraries to put more money into their eBook catalogues.

Look out for a full review of both Sony readers in the coming weeks.

First, there’s the screen size. With a 9in e-ink display and relatively narrow bezel, it feels a lot more like a portable screen than a portable computer, unlike the Amazon Kindle. Once you switch it on you can immediately see it’s not just big – it’s high resolution too, at 1,024 x 768. That’s the highest resolution we’ve seen, with the rest of the competition at 800 x 600.

It wasn’t just me who was impressed. Our eBook expert Stuart Turton, who’s with me in Germany, couldn’t suppress a grin when he first tried to navigate his way around the interface.

Initially unable to work out how to move through the menus with the keys, Stuart instinctively prodded at the screen instead. And, to his amazement, it worked. This is a touchscreen that doesn’t look like a touchscreen – it doesn’t have the drastically reduced contrast and isn’t nearly as prone to the off-putting glare of the Sony Reader Touch. Asus seems to have made the touch-sensitive layer almost invisible, so you don’t lose the all-important paper-like appearance of the e-ink screen.

Dig around in the interface and it’s clear that Asus isn’t going down the minimalist feature route. It looks like and behaves like a proper eBook reader, but there’s a stack of extra applications in there, including a web browser.

Tap that browser icon and, after a pretty lengthy wait, up it pops. Text is entered via a handwriting-recognition system, where you draw individual letters into a box, or you can pop up an onscreen keyboard. That’s as far as we got with the browser – it’s listed as a beta app in the menu system and we couldn’t make it actually load a page.

Elsewhere there’s a music player app, and in the eBook application itself you can select text with a swipe of the finger, copy it and then paste it into the text editor app. Currently it’s too slow to be very useful as a study tool, but the Asus rep we spoke to was at pains to point out that the firmware is still being developed.

And we hope that it does get some more polishing before release, since the speed of operation is currently the E Reader’s only downfall. Page turns take around three seconds, and tapping on an icon results in a long wait before anything happens.

The E Reader will be an open platform, able to read all the common formats including ePub and PDF, which is encouraging.

Despite the extra apps, battery life is still officially only being quoted in terms of page turns – currently 10,000. We’re told that Asus is “still fiddling” with batteries in order to squeeze the most out of it while using the other apps.

This is a very impressive eBook reader debut for Asus. The build quality is more than adequate, the screen is great and the extra features look usable rather than bolted on for no reason.

It’s not going to be the cheapest of eReaders, but it’s not outrageous either at a projected £250 inc VAT for the version with 11g wireless.

Asus says it’s looking into the possibilities for a 3G version with integrated SIM too.

Launch in the UK is set for the end of May. We can’t wait.

The enTourage eDGe (the company’s ridiculous capitalisation, not ours) was the highlight of the CES Unveiled event, which gives journalists a sneak preview of what’s set to appear this year’s show.  It has a  9.7in e-paper display on one side and a 10.1in LCD screen on the other, both of which are touchscreens, allowing you to annotate eBooks with handwritten notes or scan through web pages with the flick of a finger on the LCD screen.

In a brief hands-on demonstration, the eDGe showed several clever touches, such as allowing you to highlight words in eBooks, perform a Google search on the term using the built-in web browser, and then link the search results to the eBook page, which is a great research tool for students reading academic texts. You can also drag and drop pages from the greyscale e-paper screen onto the LCD, allowing readers to view images in full colour, for instance

The device runs on Google’s Android operating system, and includes built-in Wi-Fi for web browsing, updating a Twitter feed or updating your Facebook profile. The eDGe has a claimed “minimum” battery life of six hours “with everything running”, according to the enTourage spokesman we met.

The e-paper display is remarkably sharp for a touchscreen, with handwritten annotations easy to add using the built-in stylus. The LCD display was less impressive, and seemed to be suffering from a distinct lack of brightness under the harsh lighting in the conference centre, although we suspect the brightness on the demo units may have been turned down to preserve battery life.

The device is far chunkier than your average eBook reader: it’s certainly not going to be slipping unnoticed into a bag like a Kindle or Sony Reader. In fact, it’s more akin to a netbook in terms of size. It’s price tag is heavyweight too, tipping the scales at $490.

So it’s a reasonably assured start for dual-screen eBook readers, but we can’t help feeling there’s going to be better to come at this year’s show.

I know some people are sceptical about this technology, but while I love paperbacks, eBook readers perfectly suit my reading habits. Just to establish those habits, I read two-to-three books a week and probably buy six or seven every fortnight. About half of those books I’ll give away, lose, or destroy while the other half slowly take over whatever house I happen to be living in. The ability to stick 850 books on a device smaller than a single paperback means that when I finally do buy a house I won’t need to worry about hiring the Royal Navy to ship my entire library for me.

An unfortunate consequence of reviewing something is that you don’t spend a lot of time with it. We have deadlines, other commitments and looming production staff. I’ve decided to rectify that and put an eBook reader through the wringer. Accompanying me on this journey will be the Cool-er which I’ve recently finished reviewing. Basically, we’re going to best buddies for the next month. It’s going to be flung in my bag, dropped in my pocket and keeping me company on the bus. Wherever my paperback normally goes, the Cool-er will follow.

And believe me, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, because the book I’ll be reading is War and Peace, all 560,000 words of it. I’ve enjoyed reading shorter books on eBook readers, but it’s time to see if that E Ink screen holds up to really extended sessions. I’ll be recording the ups and downs as I go along, but hopefully in a month’s time I’ll be able to report back whether an eBook reader really can replace a trusty paperback.

If there’s anything you particularly want to know about any of these models feel free to give me a yell.