There’s no such thing as a two-paned e-ink device in the pipeline at Asustek. Give up the dream, dear reader. Today the company provided information on upcoming product launches, and yet  they were fairly quiet about ereaders. In fact, the one bit of ereader info in the DigiTimes article is attributed to unnamed “industry sources,” and not from Asus’ CEO Jerry Shen:

According to industry sources, the Eee Reader line will include 6-inch and 9-inch models, both featuring a grayscale touchscreen display.

In other words, more of the same.

If you’ve seen the working demo model of the Asus two-screen device, you can see that it’s more closely aligned with netbooks and notebooks, only without a physical keyboard. Asus has always said that their dual-screen device would have color displays and be able to play video, which isn’t a capability with any current e-ink technology that I know of.  Pixel Qi is doing some awesome stuff with their specialized screens, and I’m crossing my fingers that Asus will be using them in their dual-screen device (which actually would make them a new sort of ereader/PC hybrid)–but I have no reason to believe they will.

But my point is that the new ereaders coming soon from Asus are very likely going to be nearly identical in technology as current devices. What we can hope for, in terms of improvements, are lower price points and an open approach to formats.