According to Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet.com, “there are approximately 52 e-reader devices coming to market in the next 12 months”.

These range from Amazon’s Kindle, the range of Sony Readers, and the recently announced Nook from Barnes & Noble, which will all definitely be in shops all over Europe before Christmas, to a range of others, showing more or less potential.

Perhaps the most interesting of these, on two counts, is the Asus Ereader, which is pictured on the left. This promises to have two screens, thus mimicking the look and feel of an actual book. It also promises to be very cheap, and since Asus more or less invented the whole netbook brouhaha, this is a believable promise.

The Contenders

Various of the available, and promised, readers are shown in a gallery at ZD.net.

Here are direct links to some of the manufacturers entering the fray. Sony; Amazon Kindle; Nook; Asus; enTourage eDGe; Spring, who are now suing Barnes & Noble; ESlick; Creative, who hope the announced MediaBook will revive their prominence; and Elonex, who have formed a partnership with Borders, the leading UK bookshop.

Nintendo also sell a package of 100 out-of-copyright books for the DSi; and Steve Jobs has said that he believes that people will prefer a more general-purpose device like the iPod, which can run software like Stanza to read ebooks.

The Formats

I used to read ebooks five years ago on my Sony Clie TH55 (the best standalone pda ever made), using eReader Pro. In fact I read the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy that way, as well as all of Cory Doctorow’s novels. At that point there were many competing formats, all of which had disadvantages.

I also reformatted a number of out-of-copyright books into eReader format, even though the mark-up language was no fun at all to work with.

It now seems as though there are two formats finally edging into domination, with own-brand formats a distant third. The two formats that might actually become accepted standards are pdf and epub, both of which are read by the Kindle, the Nook, and Sony’s readers; as well as by Stanza and Adobe’s Digital Editions software. Both of them are also open standards, which offers some degree of future-proofing.

To my mind, the primary difference between them lies in the fact that epub is a liquid format, based on xml and css – and pdf isn’t. Web-books.com provides a good introduction to the epub format, while there are official specifications at OpenBook.org.

And so…

I am about to embark on a quick research project, with a group of students, aimed at creating a simple workflow for getting a range of material online in epub format. I know there are online tools to convert Word documents (and indeed pdf documents) into epub files. What I want is more than that. I want the stylesheets and css files that will enable us to produce a consistent look across numerous platforms with as little subsequent effort as possible.

This includes a standard for chapters; for references; and for stunningly designed liquid covers.