Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.

Three years ago, as head of Toshiba's (TSBAa.BE) power business, Norio Sasaki orchestrated the tech conglomerate's $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse's nuclear-power-plant business. Now, as Sasaki prepares to take over the president's post, he will have to show the same willingness to take chances as he tries to help overhaul the company after its biggest-ever expected annual loss.

Discovery Communications says the Kindle electronic book readers from Amazon.com violate a patent that Discovery registered in 2007.

Mitsubishi Electric will add three new products to its "Diafine" industrial TFT LCD module series. The light reflectance of the new products is about 90% lower than that of their predecessors.

Four out of five global electronic display companies have adopted environmentally-sustainable practices in their businesses, according to a recent iSuppli survey, indicating the greening of the display industry has moved beyond the talk phase and into actual practice.

Samsung Electronics, which employs VA (vertically-aligned) display technology, and LG Display, which adopts IPS (in-plane switching) display technology, are fiercely competing over share of the Chinese LCD TV market.

Power consumption of large LCD TVs can be drastically cut simply by controlling their luminance to a level "agreeable" to viewers, said Satoru Kubota, a professor at Seikei University, in his speech at Ergonomics Symposium on FPD 2009, which took place on March 6, 2009.

Brother Industries will release the "brother document viewer SV-100B," an information terminal equipped with an electronic paper module, in Japan June 1, 2009.

As LCD television buyers moved toward larger-larger screen models, Corning Inc. had to move to keep up.

Vizio said Friday that the U.S patent office had rejected claims made by Funai on one of the patents that are the subject of an ongoing patent suit between the two companies.