[PaulAuster]

Hi.
I am new to the fórum and I don’t have a reader yet. Very tough decision among going for Kindle (great access to Amazon but proprietary format) and Nook/Sony (open format).

A very good question that reviewers and people don’t seem to address clearly is about the prospects of long term availability of the e-books you purchase. I find the idea of e-books great, but we all have books in our shelfs bought 10 or even 20 years ago and you know are always available when needed. Typical examples are textbooks from college, dictionaries and "serious" literature.

But what happens with ebook? I’ll buy a e-book at Amazon or in B&N and what’s the guarantee that I will be able to read them in 10 years? This is not an issue maybe for a sport magazine or this summer bestseller, but for a “serious” book clearly it is.

I am not speaking, of course, about .pdf or .txt based e-books, but those with copyright protection management.

Also, what happens if I want to transfer an e-book to another reader or read it in my computer? Could you also backup your files in case the reader dies?

Of course, you have this issue in other areas, like photography. You store all you precious pictures in .jpeg or .dng (from Adobe), but despite you cannot know 100% for sure, it is clear that you have a reasonably good universal format.

As conclusion, I wonder whether EPUB is widely accepted enough for this purpuse (like a jpeg in photography). Trust a propietary format like Amazon's does not seem a good idea (.dng is from Adobe but licensed-free).