I wonder whether the release of the new Iliad book reader edition with no firmware upgrade means that that the prospect of a new firmware release is not going to happen anytime soon? By the way, I see that the 50 eBooks pre-loaded on the BE have cover icons in contentlister. Which leads me to wonder if the BE software is exactly the same as V2?

iRex has a pretty long release cycle between firmware versions (see this blog post (http://blog.adamrb.com/2007/12/days-between-firmware-releases.html)).

You can add pictures to the contentlister on a normal v1 or v2 firmware. You just have to manually edit the manifest.xml