Pixelar is selling an ebook reader using open-source software and with a similar specification and price to the Sony ebook.

Both have a 6in E-ink screen but the £219 Pixelar e-Reader has 512MB of memory compared with 128MB the Sony product, which lists at £224 inc Vat, though it can be bought for less. The rival Iliad reader lists at more than twice as much, including Vat, but it has a bigger screen with higher resolution and Wifi.

File formats supported by the Pixelar include PDF, MOBI, DOC, WOLF, MP3, HTML, TXT, CHM, FB2, Djvu, PNG, TIF, GIF, BMP, JPG, PPT, EPUB, LIT and PRC.

The company says that with a 4GB SD card it could carry the entire British Library collection  We'd like to see the figures on that one, but presumably they are talking text-only compressed data. (Update: it turns out it meant 3544 4GB cards, which iworks out at just over 14TB of capacity - much more likely; 2TB SD cards are supposed to be in the pipeline, so on that reckoning you could still pack the BL into into a wallet).

Languages supported include English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Ukraine, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Estonian, and Polish.