The recent Nook wireless ebook reader being produced by B&N, the worlds largest high street book stall with over 1,300 branches, seems set to lock horns with the worlds #1 selling portable ebook reader, the Amazon kindle.

While not long released, the Nook is searching to mess up Amazon.com's feathers further by taking it on openly in a segment of the market place, that up to yet, the Kindle has dominated. Ever since it's introduction, at the outset as the Kindle then later in February 2009 as the Amazon kindle 2 , it has re-ignited the ebook reader market place by offering a combination of ground-breaking specification, due to it's immediate connect wherever wireless networking and also the largest range of books available for download at marvelous, cheaper than the high street, prices.

Customers brought in to the idea in a immense way and it is only lately that the rest of the trade have woken up to the truth that this is the expectations of book purchasing. An so in the most recent few months we have had the broadcast from Sony of their intent to join in the fun, with their shortly to be released Daily Edition, and the latest press release from B&N that their own candidate, the Nook, will be back to complete manufacture very quickly.

There are no qualms that the Kindle2 is the reader everybody is going for. And to be frank it's nice to see a little opposition in this sector. Yes we have had the iRex iLiad but it was a little on the big side to be a wireless portable reading device, wonderful for office use with the 1:1 A4 reproduction, but much like the KindleDX - another wireless book reader - not something you would want to take on vacation, or put in your purse or pocket for that matter, and it was in no way going to compete on price was it?

Subsequently now we have 2 not inconsiderable companies keen to go head to head, with the power of Amazon.com, on all fronts. The book reader arm of sony of late enlarged the magnitude of their annals at the Sony-Store and discounted the prices of their digitally delivered titles to equal that of Amazons and with any luck B&N, who have always been in the equivalent ballpark price point wise, will equal them title for title too.

Nevertheless the major news for clients has to be the shift away from proprietary file formats, utilized by Sony corp. in the early days and even now utilized by the Kindle now. To clarify the situation I will make use of Amazon as an example, bear in mind this is even now the case with the Kindle so it makes it crystal clear.

Through proprietary formats, when you purchase a book for digital download from Amazon it will come in their specific file format .AZW which only enables you to read it on the Kindle2. So if in the future you decided you wanted to swap ebook readers to an alternative make, your library of e-books happen to be worthless. Decide for yourself if it's decent or not.

That scenario has been a large obstacle for the business in general but also for the manufacturers of other ebook readers in particular. They where on no account going to be able to offer the number of novels Amazon where competent of doing and so this aided sales of the Kindle . And so they offer aid for additional file formats, mostly the Adobe .PDF, which is a preferred format for free electronic books, but this format does not mimic a scaled down type of text too good as it was always supposed to be reproducing text at an A4 size, picture perfect for the Kindledx and iLiad e-readers but not so for the little 5,6 and 7 inch displays.

And so came the E-pub standard, an open source format intended to display text. It is fast emerging as the standard of the future and has recieved support from the likes of Google Library who will be releasing their whole one million titles, of which the majority are at no cost to download, in this standard. Barnes and Noble will also be doing the same the same as will the Sony-Store.

So you should see that the digital ebook reader that has support for this format will be future proof. B&N's Nook Revolutionary wireless reading device has .Epub support, as does the Sony Daily Edition, and so you can download your electronic books from wherever you decide, paid for or free, moreover not merely from the manufacturer of the portable electronic book reader , that is the case with the Kindle 2 ebook reader device.