The Sony PRS-700BC e-book reader will include a touch-screen as well as other features customers had demanded, including a backlight.

Sony's continuing effort to one-up other e-book products, including Amazon's Kindle, is good news for companies and consumers who have invested in PDF e-books. Several standards currently compete for mindshare and market share. PDF dominates on personal computing desktops and laptops—the most popular reading devices for e-books, hands down.

But PDF's reflow limitations for mobile devices such as smart phones and PDAs have precipitated a new, open-source XML-based EPUB format that Adobe and other vendors are supporting—and whose files open on the new Sony readers.

"Obviously, PDF has played a role in the e-book business, especially on the PC consumption, but frankly it complicated the adoption of e-books on small-screen devices," McCoy says. "Adobe tried to convince people PDF was great for small-screen devices, but it isn't because it's page-oriented and that's a problem."

While Adobe strives to improve the implementation of PDF on mobile devices "substantially," McCoy says, he sees formats such as EPUB playing an expanding role along with the much more printer- and graphics-friendly PDF versions on desktops and laptops. In effect, the two standards will live together, output from traditional publishing apps such as InDesign.

Where does this leave the Amazon Kindle, an e-book reading device that debuted last year? In its own little box, requiring publishers to use its Digital Text Platform, (DTP) which ports files from various formats into a proprietary format that the Kindle can read. It cannot open PDFs, as the Sony reader can, and isn't likely to support EPUB any time soon. PDFs can be converted to Amazon's DTP, but Amazon recommends against doing so. Instead it suggests users save application files as HTML before running them through its online publishing platform.

Although the Kindle appears to be a closed-format device, it does have the marketing muscle of Amazon behind it. And while the company so far said little about a new model, pictures of a new Kindle have appeared on several blogs, along with rumors of its impending release.

McCoy says the Kindle is sexy, but the PC will remain the platform on which most e-books are read for the forseeable future. Strongest sales of e-books currently are trade fiction, reference, or educational books. When it comes down to it, he predicts that the game-changing device for the portable e-book market will be the first $99 e-book reader. That could take some months to appear; both the Sony and Amazon models currently start at around $300.

In the long run, however, McCoy says that the future of the e-book appears healthy as markets for both educational and trade books grow, year to year. Customers have begun to realize that they can save money on digital editions—which cost less to purchase—and reduce impact on the environment by going electronic.

"The digital content is cheaper, and it's also saving the environment because [it sidesteps] creating paper--one of the most polluting things you can manufacture—plus ink, also a pollutant, and burning fuel trucking all that stuff around," he says. "A digital download probably consumes, net, a thousand times less resources."