If you haven’t heard the news… Sony is releas­ing a new e‑book read­er, its answer to Ama­zon’s Kin­dle. Retail­ing at $399, the Sony read­er will fea­ture a touch screen (some­thing the Kin­dle does­n’t have) and the abil­i­ty to down­load books wire­less­ly (some­thing the Kin­dle does have). It will also pro­vide access to thou­sands of free (pub­lic domain) books & doc­u­ments pro­vid­ed by Google Book Search. A nice touch.

But I’m won­der­ing whether the Sony read­er will beat the Kin­dle in the one cat­e­go­ry that real­ly counts? Will it have a tru­ly read­able screen? The Sony and Ama­zon screens each use “e‑ink” tech­nol­o­gy, which does­n’t cut the mus­tard. As Nichol­son Bak­er recent­ly wrote in The New York­er, “The prob­lem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had real­ly been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The prob­lem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a green­ish, sick­ly gray. A post­mortem gray. The resiz­able type­face, Mono­type Cae­cil­ia, appeared as a dark­er gray. Dark gray on paler green­ish gray was the palette of the Ama­zon Kin­dle.”

Hope­ful­ly Sony fig­ures this piece out. If not, Apple may. Accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal, Steve Jobs is back at Apple, just months after his liv­er trans­plant, work­ing hard and rais­ing the blood pres­sure of Apple employ­ees, as they pre­pare to roll out a mul­ti­me­dia tablet that’s rumored to include, yes, an e‑book read­er.