Today’s news may be dominated by that other e-reader/netbook hybrid, but another e-reader that we’re looking forward to, the Skiff Reader, has managed to snag at least one headline.

According to this report in Crain’s New York, Skiff is set to unveil its reader by the end of the year:

“As a wireless digital reading device, the Skiff Reader stands out from products such as Amazon’s Kindle, which is optimized for book reading, in its ability to render magazine and newspaper layouts with a look similar to the print brands. It uses multiple columns, photos, familiar-looking type fonts and pagination and has a large display and a touch-screen user interface. The Skiff Reader is due to be available by the end of the year though Sprint’s physical and online stores and Skiff’s online storefront for an as-yet-undisclosed retail price.”

The Skiff Reader may be optimized for periodical reading, and working closely with Hearst — which helped incubate the tech company — will get it access to the magazine publisher’s stable of titles, but how will it fare against other e-readers and the new behemoth, the iPad? Will magazine readers be so enamored with the newest Apple product that by the time the Skiff Reader launches it will go unnoticed? The performance, battery life and price of both products — and iPad’s connection to AT&T while Skiff sticks with Sprint — may play a crucial part in both products’ future.

Another key selling point: Skiff’s reader will be bendy.

Read more: Hearst-backed Skiff e-reader to debut this year

Previously: Hearst Enters E-Reader Market With Skiff

From the Alex to the Skiff, today’s mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast was all about e-readers. Hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy‘s Matt Van Hoven had a run down of all the e-readers that are coming to the market soon, including a bunch that have been announced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Jason and Matt were also joined by Time magazine’s Techland blogger Peter Ha, who had a dispatch from CES. After talking about what he’s seen at the trade show, Peter gave his thoughts on the future of the e-reader market.

“The e-reader market is so small and all these folks are trying to jump into it,” he said. “Realistically, how many can survive? Maybe one or two.”

Also discussed: some tips for aspiring technology writers.

For more e-reader news, check out mediabistro.com’s newest blog, eBookNewser.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

Yesterday, at mediabistro.com’s eBook Summit, we were eager to hear what Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab had to say about e-readers and the future of newspapers.

Benton said he understood why those in the media held the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader product, out as the possible savior of the industry — since Kindle users were willing to pay for newspaper subscriptions while online readers were not. But this theory fails because Kindle users represent such a small part of total number people who read the news. “It’s a way to get marginal income from a small percentage of people who are willing to pay for news,” he said.

Also, the Kindle itself is not a good tool for reading newspapers, and certainly not magazines. There are additional features e-readers would need in order to make good news reading devices, like a fast connection, alerts and multimedia capabilities. “E-readers will become a mainstream category when they become excellent web devices,” Benton said. However, when that happens, “the news business model for e-readers collapses.”

Guess as far as Benton is concerned, e-readers won’t be the savior of the print news industry that everyone is hoping they will be. Instead, newspapers and magazines will become smaller, more expensive and “more elite products,” and most people will still get their news for free from the Web.

And as we wrap up our coverage of the eBook Summit, check out some photos from the event yesterday and today.

Previously: BBC’s Katty Kay Weighs Writing, Blogging With Paying The Bills

If the title “eBook Summit” conjures up a vision of publishing industry executives, agents and writers, well, you’re not that far off. But we were also not surprised to see that there is a lot that journalists and news organizations can take away from the panels at today’s mediabistro.com eBook Summit — and not just those journalists who have written books or hope to someday. In fact, we believe e-readers will have a huge impact on the print media world — not just the publishing world — in the New Year.

We sat in on a panel this morning that featured Jennifer Stenger, who oversees licensing and business development for mobile markets for the Associated Press. She spoke about the AP’s expansion into providing its content on mobile devices and e-readers. This is a shift for the AP, she said, because the organization has traditionally just provided news content to other news organizations who then repackage it and distribute it to readers or viewers. Now, the AP can tap these users directly, so it is learning what information people want and how they want to get it. “It gives us something we’ve never had before, which is a direct connection to users,” she said.

Also surprising to the AP, she said, was that readers were willing to pay for content on their e-readers. Where traditionally information on the Internet has been given away for free, making online readers less inclined to pay for it, e-reader users were willing to shill out to get information specially curated for them.

“It was kind of a surprise to us that they wanted to charge [for e-reader content], because news on the Web is free and no one wants to pay for the news anymore,” Stenger said. “And not only did they want to charge, they wanted to charge per category of news. We thought this would never work, no one would ever want to pay. But on the contrary, people are willing to pay for what they want, and most of what they are paying for is convenience.”

For more coverage of today’s conference, head over to our sister blogs, eBookNewser and GalleyCat.