The Kno tablet is gaining ground in the textbook market and Sharp has just introduced their own tablet (although only in Japanese markets.) We are starting to see a vibrant and blooming e-reading culture—according to Amazon’s numbers—and the market is quite ready for more products that slot themselves into niches and tasks.

The niche the Kno has aimed for, and it’s aimed well, is textbooks. They’ve recently released a smaller version to go with their double-paned e-textbook reader—the smaller version sports a single and smaller screen. However, it will be more portable and likely a bit cheaper than the full-sized Kno tablet. This educational device has a lot of interesting applications especially for students and the classroom, focusing on education related functions.

The announcement is brought to us by Business Wire,

Kno, short for knowledge, is a transformative learning platform that blends a touch-screen tablet, digital textbooks, course materials, note-taking, web access, educational applications, digital media, sharing and more into a powerful and engaging educational experience that is not available on any other tablet or eReader today.

“From day one, we designed the Kno with flexibility in mind,” said Babur Habib, CTO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “We developed the product to have multiple configurations and meet different student needs. The single screen maintains the elegance of our fluid, intuitive interface while capturing the richness and ‘page fidelity’ of the original textbook.”

With e-textbook readers at the hand, students won’t have to carry as much from class to class and will have an Internet enabled resource at their fingertips to increase productivity. I certainly would have killed to have something like this while taking my college classes; especially with the number of people sporting laptops in the classroom. Touch screens will all but eliminate the white-noise clatter of keys and return us the squeak of dry erase markers again.

The Sharp tablets came to market alongside a cloud-based e-book store for Japanese readers. Of the two offerings one is a small, mobile device at 5.5-inch LCD display and the other one is designed for more indoor use with a 10.8-inch display. According to Cnet, the e-book store should have an extremely broad offering for these devices, containing both periodicals and books:

The e-bookstore will offer approximately 30,000 newspapers, magazines, and books, the company said today. It will include an “Automatic Schedule Delivery Service” for periodicals, which will allow magazine and newspaper publishers to automatically push new editions to the user’s e-reader. Sharp didn’t say how much content in the store will cost; it plans to reveal pricing details later this year.

The tablets aren’t due to be released until December 2010, but the buzz for this device already looks lovely.

Newspaper stands in Japan may already be quivering in their bolts over this sort of product—savvy commuters could just boot up their Sharp mobile tablet device in the morning to get their favorite magazines and newspapers through the push service and then having something to read on the train to work. Internet enabled e-book reading devices certainly crack open a profoundly deep well of customers for periodicals, they just have to start making it easy for their customers to subscribe to them and receive issues and the game will be set.

Adding to the bloom in the tablet market, HP’s Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley, has said that tablets will be a $40 billion market over the next few years. Right now HP is angling through their acquisition of Palm and Palms WebOS. A primary reason he stated, from a Techcrunch article, is going to be keeping display and applications consistent between full-size tablets and mobile tablets so that users can shift seamlessly between views.