What Format Will Be Standard For E-Books?
Following two years of dominance by Amazon, it now seems as if the e-book market is about to witness some genuine competition. It’s even possible that the Amazon Kindle may lose its current market leader position.
A number of manufacturers are readying themselves to release new e-book readers – some before the end of 2009, with others planned for launch in early 2010. Sony have confirmed the launch of their new Daily Edition reader for example. This will have 3g wireless connectivity, touch screen controls and will allow users to borrow e-books by downloading them for a predefined loan period from their local lending library.
Other manufacturers, including Plastic Logic and Apple, will have new readers on offer in the near future.
The technical specification of e-book readers is certainly a very important factor. However, in the final analysis, it may not be the most important aspect in determining success. Amazon currently have a huge selection of books to download for the Kindle on their website – over 300,000 are available (and increasing every day). Unfortunately, if you have a Kindle, then you are pretty well tied to buying your books from Amazon. If you want to change to a different reader later on, you won’t be able to port your Kindle books over to it due to the proprietary format. Maybe in future some transfer option will be made available – but right now it’s Kindle books for the Kindle reader.
Most of the other manufacturers seem to be lining up behind one common format – ePub – which is different from that currently used by Amazon. This would give users the freedom to transfer e-books from one reader to another and also afford them more choice when deciding where to buy their e-books from in the first place.
If, as seems likely, ePub becomes the standard across the industry, then it may well be the case that what is currently a competitive advantage for Amazon may turn into a liability. Certainly, it would be possible for Amazon to recover the situation by making their e-books compatible with whatever industry standard is adopted – either by the provision of a translation facility or simply by adopting the new standard themselves.
Regardless of whether or not Amazon can hold on to their current leadership position, it does appear that the e-book market is going to experience some cut-throat competition going forward and that standard formats will be put in place in the near future. This is good news for consumers as prices will inevitably fall.
Learn more about theAmazon Kindle reader and find out how to get free Kindle books direct from Amazon’s website.
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