Originally written for eBookGuru - The Digital Magazine Devoted to eBooks

I monitor a variety of RSS feeds and I am always on the lookout for news on eBooks and eReaders. This week there seems to be an embarrassment of riches in terms of the number of articles available.

Here is just a sampling of a few of them:

PCMag.com reviews the new Barnes & Noble eReader software for PC, Mac and iPhone and overall rates it 3½ out of 5. It also takes a shot at Amazon and the Kindle, stating that B&N allows you to read titles on devices you already own. It also compares Amazon’s Kindle library (300,000 titles) to B&N’s eBook library (700,000 titles). Overall the B&N appears to be an attractive eBook store alternative to Amazon, and the addition of an eReader from Plastic Logic that promises to start shipping in early 2010 will only make the comparison even easier.

Adding insult to injury to the beleaguered Kindle is a damning article in the New Yorker. The article has some harsh criticism for the device and Amazon’s proprietary format, although to be fair some of the criticism is specific to eInk devices, notably the lack of color and back-lighting. Overall the author does seem positive about eBooks but seems to prefer the Sony eReader for eInk and the Apple iPhone / iPod Touch where color, illustrations, and back-lighting are important.

Another interesting article appeared in IT Canada regarding the EPUB format, which was developed by the Toronto based International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It states that the EPUB format

is quickly becoming an e-book industry standard as support from publishers and tech giants such as Adobe Systems Inc., Sony Corp. and Google Inc. continues to grow.

In sharp contrast to Amazons proprietary DRM restricted AZW format, EPUB is an open, non-proprietary, XML based format, in which DRM is optional.

The industry has gone into two camps: Amazon and everyone else … You have Amazon and they’ve got their proprietary, closed standard, DRM, one-source-for-everything (approach) and you’ve got the rest of the world trying to agree on an open standard for which you can have multiple book stores.

There is also the news that Samsung has launched their eBook reader, although it is only available in South Korea for the moment. The device is smaller than a Kindle and will offer some neat features like hand-writing recognition.

Finally there is the possibility of Apple competing against Amazon with the rumored introduction of a Tablet PC. The combination of a Tablet PC and the iTunes store could

blow Amazon and other e-book makers out of the water…

The success of iTunes for music and iPhone applications indicates that there is market potential for eBooks by making eBooks just as easy to download. It goes further to speculate about à-la-carte ordering books, something that already possible through the Shortcovers program from Canada’s very own Indigo Books.

The one thing that none of these articles dispute is that there is a future for eBooks. What this future looks like, how we will be reading eBooks, and what format the eBooks will be available in, are all very good questions. Personally having seen what DRM has done to the music industry, not to mention how Amazon bungled it’s recent recall of illegally published Kindle books, I’m hoping for the success of an open format like EPUB and as many readers as possible.