Taipei, May 31, 2010 (CENS)--Acer Inc. announced its first electronic book, christened LumiRead, on May 27 at a press conference in Beijing, officially making inroad into the arena being dominated by Apple with its iPad and Amazon with its Kindle.

Acer will roll out monochrome version of the online reading device sometime in the third quarter and color type in the fourth quarter. It has chosen e-book platform providers Barnes & Noble of the United States, Founder Group of mainland China and Libri.de of Germany as its partners in this field.

Acer`s monochrome e-book will use E-Ink`s electronic paper, the same device built in Kindle, while its color book will adopt ARM processor as iPad does. Windows 7 and Android are two OS options for the color book.

Industry executives consider e-book as a crucial step of Acer`s pledge to become the world`s leader in the information-communications technology (ICT) industry after it wins the No.1 title in notebook and PC markets. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang noted ICT market has annual revenue of US$600 billion, nearly triple the size of PC market.

Acer surpassed Dell for the first time late last year to become the world`s No.2 PC supplier. In mainland China, strategic partnership in PC and e-book fields is estimated to make the Acer-Founder alliance the No.3 PC supplier, closing on HP. Acer was once reported to have intention to acquire Founder.

As the mainland is estimated to emerge as the world`s No.1 PC market in 2011, it is reasonable for Acer to build partnership with mainland Chinese PC heavyweights for its No.1 title plan.

(by Ken Liu)