E-readers: the compatibility conundrum
With the Kindle, Nook, a raft of new e-readers comes an issue well known to early adopters: what’s next?
Just as iPods replaced your record collection with a click wheel and a pair of white headphones, e-readers now want to digitize your bookcase. The problem is: they all want to do it in different ways.
Rich Clabaugh/Staff
At this month’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the biggest tech convention of the year, attendants found a trove of e-reader devices.
Just as iPods replaced your record collection with a click wheel and a pair of white headphones, the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and untold others now want to digitize your bookcase.
However, they all want to do it in different ways.
If you bought a Kindle a year ago, loaded it up with e-books but then became smitten with the Nook, your purchased books cannot follow you over to the new device – the Kindle files will be inscrutable to a Nook.
For now, e-books are not like DVDs – where a movie will work in a Panasonic, Toshiba, or any other company’s player. Transferring e-books is more like sticking that DVD into a VCR tape deck.
The issue here lies in the age-old plight of early adopters: file formats. There are more than 10 e-book formats. But luckily, one seems to have emerged as an industry standard.
