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

However, as important as the technical specification of the various reader devices is likely to be, it may not be the deciding factor. At the moment, the ability to choose an e-book from Amazon’s huge range of available titles is a huge advantage for them. There are over 300,000 e-books available for the Kindle on the Amazon website. The trouble is that you must buy your e-books from the Amazon store. Further, if you subsequently decide to change your reader to a different type, then you are currently unable to take your e-books with you. Possibly this option may be made available in future, but currently it’s a case of Kindle reader, Kindle e-books. Put it another way – it’s a closed system.

The majority of the other manufacturers seem to be favoring a common format for e-books – ePub – which is different from Amazon’s format. This would allow users to transfer e-books across different readers and also give them more choice as to where they buy their e-books from in the first place. Greater freedom of choice in other words.

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.

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.

Get the facts on theAmazon Kindle ebook reader and discover how you can get free Kindle books.