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In the IT industry this situation has occured many times over the years that I have been apart of the industry and prior experience has taught me that there are two types of IT sectors - mature and immature sectors. The electronic books definetly fall into the immature catagory. These issues typically follow an established pattern that generally plays itself out to evolve the industry sector into a more mature industry. Getting in our time machines and going back to the 1970's PCs as a whole were considered to be an immature sector and their detractors were correct to lable the sector that way. There were several different camps in the IT industry that were often times built around a company and their products, there was the IBM sector, the apple sector (which incidently remains but not as a seperate sector since apple products have the ability to interoperate with IBM products they have joined the IBM camp). Those were the two major camps but there were more including Commodore and others that do not come to mind. Each sector had a go it alone approach to IT and attemtped to prove that they were the best at everything IT. Eventually the industry shaked out and combined camps to form one big camp, which incidently the company that built that camp (IBM) was driven out of the leadership role (with the failure of the PS/2 PCs). After all how many people here the term "PC Compatible" any more. Once the industry shaked out and combined camps it became a lot easier to oeprate PCs and get things done.
Another example of this maturation of the industry occured later with the introduction of the VHS and Beta. Neither format could talk to the other and eventually beta was not selected (incidently this was one decision that was made by the movie making companies not the consumer).
This happned again with the introduction of the Blue Ray DVD and High Definition DVD two different formats with different capabilities and again the movie comapnies selected for the consumer the blue ray. At the time I was simply unwilling to pay the high prices for either and waited until they reached a range I was willing to pay and by that time the decission had been made.
My beliefe is that electronic books are no different then the older examples that I have cited above. The industry will eventually shake out and formats will be dropped and eventually a customer will be able to buy from anywhere. At the moment the producers are more interested in being a monopoly then serving their customers wishes.
My perdiction is that there will be a fight betwen Amazon and Barns and Nobles to dominate the electronic book market and the winner will be the industry standard. I am perdiciting that Amazon will win the fight but until the shake out ocurrs my advice has and always be to get yourself a smart phone and download and install all of the free readers that you can get from the internet. This way you can buy books from where ever you so desire.
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