Borders has beat Amazon.com to market with an e-book reader in the UK. While Amazon was struggling to meet consumer demand for the Kindle in the US, Borders partnered with iRex Technologies to sell the iRex iLiad Book Edition in some of its UK stores, Pocket-lint reports.

The iLiad boasts an 8.1-inch screen and has enough internal memory to store 100 books. It can handle up to an eight-gig memory card, pushing its capacity to around 10,000 books.

Borders will start selling the iLiad on May 10 for 399 pounds ($779). Amazon charges $399 for the Kindle. The lightweight iLiad comes pre-loaded with 50 "classic" books. It supports PDF, HTML, TXT and Mobipocket file formats, giving readers a wide variety of content choices.

No word on if Borders plans on expanding iLiad sales to more UK stores or go head-to-head against Amazon's Kindle in the States.

Ars Technica posted a detailed analysis of the current generation Kindle, and covered some recent rumors about the second generation of Amazon's eBook reader, saying that they've heard Amazon may be on the verge of announcing a Kindle 2.0. A source aware of the launch plans described it to Ars Technica as "the device they wanted to release in the first place."

As the article points out, we still have no idea how well the first one is doing. Sure, it's out of stock all the time as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say on a regular basis. But given that the company hasn't released any sales figures, "out of stock" could mean that they make 100 of them at a time, or it could mean they've sold hundreds of thousands of them.

The reality is that it's probably somewhere between those extremes; at 400 bucks plus extra data charges for its various Web services, it's not the kind of device that will sell millions, at least not yet.

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Random House has teamed with British digital content firm Spoken Entertainment on the launch of the first UK-based service for downloading audiobooks directly to mobile phones.

Dubbed GoSpoken, the service is designed for phones that support high-speed downloads and for consumers with a data plan to go with their phone. Users can visit GoSpoken.com directly from their handset to purchase and download full-length audiobooks that are charged either to their wireless phone bill or a PayPal account.

GoSpoken went live with 50 Random House titles from authors including John Grisham, Karin Slaughter, Thomas Harris and James Patterson. There are also six audiobooks from Andy McNab, who's a partner in Spoken Entertainment.

Encyclopedia fans rejoice! World Book expanded its mobile licensing program to make a lot more of its content available to mobile application developers and distributors. Now, third-party apps can use factoids from more than 90 World Book titles. They'll also have access to a bunch of datasets that can be customized and integrated into all sorts of digital applications, including games. Dataset topics include history, geography, science, literature, art, music, biography and general reference along with an image dataset with more than 20,000 illustrations, diagrams, graphs and maps.

The first mobile developer to take advantage of the newly available content is Mobifusion, which is publishing children's titles under the World Book Mobile imprint, "Baby's First Book" and "World of Animals."

Tribune Media Services just announced the launch of a new political commentary magazine called Opinionated: Voices and Viewpoints on America and the World. What's notable is that the weekly magazine will be distributed exclusively on the Amazon Kindle, the company's eBook reader.

The first issue is currently available on a free trial and subscription basis on Amazon. Opinionated will be published weekly on Mondays and will cost $.49 an issue and $1.49 for a monthly subscription.

The Kindle is the only eBook reader with cellular data capability, so we can see why it's attractive as a weekly magazine dispenser—but it's also a risky move, given the limited market. The pricing is on the low side for a weekly, however.

According to the announcement, Opinionated will draw material from columnists syndicated by Tribune Media Services, on "domestic and international politics, economics, world affairs, social issues, pop culture and other topics. The lineup includes Ian Bremmer, Nathan Gardels, Jonah Goldberg, Carl Hiaasen, Arianna Huffington, Jesse Jackson, Garrison Keillor, Paul Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Clarence Page, William Pfaff, Leonard Pitts, Cal Thomas, and Jules Witcover among many others."

TMS said that they're working on launching several other magazines for the Kindle on topics including personal finance, travel, food and popular culture.

Good news for audio book fans: The New York Times is reporting that some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the copy protection software on digital downloads of audio books:

"The trend will allow consumers who download audio books to freely transfer these digital files between devices like their computers, iPods and cell phones—and conceivably share them with others. Dropping copying restrictions could also allow a variety of online retailers to start to sell audio book downloads."

Last month, Random House, the world's largest publisher, first said that it would begin to offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 downloads unless any specific authors told them otherwise. Now, Penguin Books, the second largest publisher in the U.S. after Random House, just announced the same thing, saying that its unprotected MP3 files will be offered via eMusic.

We were wondering about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's enthusiastic announcement about how the Amazon Kindle eBook reader is selling really well, given that he reported no numbers whatsoever in his speech.

It turns out Wired was wondering the same thing, so they did a little investigating. In a short interview with the Silicon Alley Insider, Arthur Klebanoff, the CEO of e-book publisher RosettaBooks, declared that he has so far seen no evidence that the Bezo-Box has generated any more revenue for his company than Sony's e-Reader, the magazine said.

Klebanoff wasn't against the Kindle itself, hoewver; Wired said that he and other insiders have noted that for these types of new products, it takes more than a year to really understand their value in the marketplace, since the delivery system, the hardware, and the idea of the technology's availability is all new to many consumers.

Publisher Sees 'No Evidence' That Amazon Kindle is More Profitable Than Sony Reader [Wired]

It's hard to avoid the kindling puns—so we understand why Wired didn't. The magazine reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that their Kindle book reader is on fire: "Kindle is, in terms of demand, is outpacing our expectations [...] We're working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week."

This announcement comes right after the report that Amazon will be buying audiobook company Audible for $300 million. As Wired notes, it suddenly makes a lot of sense why the Kindle has that built-in MP3 player that no one thought would be of any use.

Bezos Says Kindle is On Fire [Wired]