An electronic book is the obvious choice, but it’s hard to beat books at the optimal technology for reading. E-readers have been expensive and clunky and had a lack of content. At least until recently. Now there seem to be three major players, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. I’ve read about each though I’ve only touch Amazon’s Kindle in person.

Kindle and B&N’s nook have the same price point and similar features. The nook seems to have software that isn’t quite there in terms of quality and performance but uses more open standards than Kindle.

I’d probably get a Kindle in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one thing. The Kindle’s DRM locks me into Amazon. I don’t want to buy books that lock me into a single hardware vendor. The Kindle has some great features but the DRM implementation is onerous and I don’t trust any single company to keep my best interests at heart. If we must have DRM then let’s have interoperable DRM and the EPUB standard seems the best bet for this. Unless Amazon switches to an open standard, I’m not very likely to buy a Kindle even though it’s arguably the best reader on the market with the largest library of material of likely interest to me.

The nook has the advantage of supporting EPUB but the performance is so sluggish that I’m not sure I could live with it. Hopefully that will improve. Yesterdays firmware update (v1.1) seems to help some, but it’s yet to be proven that the hardware platform is up to the task. I’m pretty sure that nook2 will be much improved but will this nook ever live up to it’s hype?

Sony’s readers look nice. They support EPUB. The UI looks good. The touchscreen models suffer from glare from the video’s I’ve seen and the low-end,  non-touchscreen model uses a screen that’s just too small.

Because B&N uses a DRM model that is different than Sony, the advantage of EPUB for interoperability is largely gone. A nook can read Sony’s DRM but, at least for now, a Sony can’t read nook’s DRM. That may change, but for now EPUB isn’t living up to it’s promise.

So, I sit back and wait and my bookshelves continue to overflow.