Low Price Digital E-Book Reading Devices Coming Soon

Digitized books, newspapers, and magazine publications are on the rise. Digitized publications are easier to deliver. They do not need to utilize paper resources. People are becoming more adapted to reading information from computer screens. And a number of companies are entering the digital reader market. If you are thinking of buying a digital reading device you may want to wait. The premiere e-book reader, Amazon's Kindle 2, will soon have a bevy of lower price and diverse designed models to contend with. There is an impending digital reader war brewing as new e-reader entries begin bombarding the market.

Amazon's Kindle 2 suggested retail price of $300 and Kindle DX at $490 will meet with steep competition from the e-book reader offerings of Sony, Asus, Plastic Logic, and Interead, a few of the companies headed to market with e-readers in the $165 to $400 price range. This will make your transition to digital books, newspapers and magazine publications quite easy. The only drawback to the forthcoming flood of e-book readers is the compatibility issue. No e-book publication standard has been established. For that reason, subscriptions for digitized newspapers and magazines you have purchased through Amazon are only read on Amazon's Kindle product and cannot be transferred to any other reader format.

When selecting an e-reader two important factors to consider is the number of each reader's associated online bookstore. The fewer online bookstore associations they have, the less of a selection you will have to choose from. Examine the file formats and the digital rights management (DRM) the reader supports. You want to make sure the most popular file formats are supported until a standard file format is selected.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on Google's role in the e-book and e-reader market. They are in the process of scanning millions of out of print books they wish to make available through Google's Book Search service. This will surely have an influence of the eBook file format standardization decision. Amazon is fervently opposed to this action, under the belief that Google's power will enable them to make it difficult for other eBook sellers to acquire access to scan and distribute the same public domain books.

The world of the e-reader device is growing. Amazon dominates the market currently but the new manufacturers all hope to change that with low price and more feature latent ebook readers. There is no doubt that all of the major publishing houses are going to switch to digital publication and e-readers are going to become as necessary as a computer is today. College text books have already begun the transition. The eBook reading device war is looming. Keep an eye out to see who wins.

Resource: Get Ready for the E-Reader Rumble of 2010 - Wired Magazine - September, 2009

Tags: ebook reader, e-reader, digital ebook reading device, Amazon Kindle, DRM