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What Format Will Be Standard For E-Books?

Written by Andrew King Saturday, 21 November 2009 09:03

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.

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.

There are a large number of manufacturers who are getting ready to launch new e-book reader hardware - some before the end of 2009, some early next year. The launch of no fewer than three new readers has been confirmed by Sony. The Sony Daily Edition reader - due to launch in December 2009 - is probably the most significant of these. It will have touch screen controls, 3g wireless connection and will let users borrow e-books on loan from participating lending libraries.

Other manufacturers such as Barnes and Noble, Apple, Microsoft, iRex and Plastic Logic all have new readers planned for release in the near future.

As important as the technical aspects of these various readers are, it may not, in the final analysis, be the deciding factor. Currently the ability to select an e-book from Amazon's massive collection of available titles is a big advantage for them. More than 300,000 titles are available for the Kindle on the Amazon website. The problem is that you must buy your e-books from Amazon. If you then decide to change to a different type of reader, you won't be able to transfer your Kindle books over to it. It's possible that some transfer option may be made available in future - but at the moment it's a case of Kindle e-books for the Kindle reader. In other words it's a closed system.

Other manufacturers seem to be moving towards a common e-book format - called ePub, which is different to that used by Amazon. This would allow users the licence to port books between different reader devices. It would also allow them to source their e-books from a number of different vendors. In other words, it would give them more freedom of choice.

In the event that the ePub format became an industry wide standard, then it may turn out that Amazon's current competitive advantage could be transformed into a bit of a liability. Were this to happen, Amazon could certainly recover by ensuring that their e-books were compatible. this could be done using either a translation facility or simply by adopting the new standard.

Whether or not Amazon are able to retain their current dominant position, it looks very much as if the e-book market is going to have some strong competition in future and that industry standards will be put in place sooner rather than later. All of this is excellent news for consumers.