The CES show this week had a few new e-reader concepts coming. I think this technology is due to explode, though only if someone tackles it in a way similar to how PCs were handled, not the iPod. The Kindle is still the king of this world, but I wonder for how long.

One of the very interesting readers is the Liquavista full color reader. I like the idea of color for magazines, though I’ve never been concerned about it for books. It’s compared here to the Sony reader.

As long as battery life doesn’t suffer too much, I think this is great. It means that I’m likely to consider this for magazines and other places where pictures matter.

Now this reader from Skiff is one that I am interested in. When I first heard about e-ink, this is what I had in mind. A more flexible, construction paper like membrane that would rewrite itself.

I just hope there is some durability here to drop this in a laptop bag or suitcase. If there is, then I might consider one of these.

I actually had pictured something like this enTourage reader, but with the flexibility of the Skiff for my ideal reader. Something that let me approach life like a newspaper, going from page to page, closing it when I wanted to. The Kindle with a case was like this, but the cover felt like a waste. If there was something there, it would be nice.

This reader, however, looks too bulky for me. That’s the wrong direction, in my mind, though if you could turn off half of this and save power, it starts to get interesting. Running Andriod, this is very interesting, especially if you can move those images from the e-reader to the laptop for color.

I’ve been reading a book with charts and graphs, and they don’t scale well on the iPhone. Even on the PC they’re hard to read inside the Kindle reader. The problem is that they need to get out of the Kindle environment and allow the reader to zoom in enough to use them. This would be critical for textbooks.

Overall it’s great to see new devices coming onto the market. The problem, in my mind, is that we are still too fragmented in terms of the “stores” and “networks” for these devices. I want to be able to buy the enTourage, or Skiff, and still buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I shouldn’t be locked into just one store, and I think this type of bundling, is ultimately what needs to be fixed. While iTunes exists for the iPod, I can easily load my Amazon MP3s or CDs into it as well.