Spring Design issued a press release yesterday announcing that the Alex Reader will start shipping today, April 14th.
At $399 it's hard to see how the Alex will be able to compete with the likes of the big three ereaders: Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle, and B&N Nook. The larger Sony PRS-900 and iRex DR-800 both cost the same price and the comparable Sony 600, Kindle 2, and Nook all cost much less at around $259.
The Alex Reader offers some nifty new features, there's no question about that, but for just $100 more the Apple iPad can do everything from browsing the web to playing HD videos.
Spring Design once announced that the Alex would be sold from Borders for $359, but now there's no mention of that anywhere. One interesting thing from the press release, though, they mentioned that multi-language versions of Alex for countries speaking Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Hebrew will be announced soon. And that Alex is the first ereader to offer international versions of the product through local country partners connecting to local bookstores.