Will today’s eBook readers soon be obsolete?

Did you catch the notice the other day that Barnes & Nobe’s new Nook eBook reader is all sold out for the holiday season and won’t be available again till January. Meanwhile, Forrester Research is estimating that 900,000 eBook readers from Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader will be bought and given as gifts between now and Christmas.

And online, a Kindle reader for the iPhone is being downloaded briskly.

eBooks have finally come of age. But with three major competitors now, each with their own proprietary formats, and Google purportedly waiting in the wings to bring out its own, we’re finding ourselves in the old eight track/beta tape dilemma.

In other words, just as eight track tapes were suddenly made useless by smaller cassette tapes and then CDs and then beta tape gave way to VHS and now DVDs, so these e-Book readers may be made obsolete by rapidly improving technology. The books you buy for one device right now are likely not going to be readable on newer devices.

I’ve been an early adapter of this technology, globbing on to the first Kindle when it came out two years ago. Since then, there have been two new versions and some of the latest improvements aren’t compatible with my older Kindle. I paid about $350 for it in 2007 and, while it’s still quite usable, I’m somewhat frustrated that, well, it’s been left behind in the technodust. the screen is markedly less crisp than the new models and an update that came down the pike the other day from Amazon doesn’t work with the first model.

Manufacturers are working to come up with a shared format but as of now, what you buy for one eBook may not work with another.

I’m expecting this will all come to a head soon, certainly in 2010, with one format becoming dominant. Like those who got beta deck VCR recorders back in the 1980’s only to find out that VHS was what the industry was going to, I don’t think I’d be buying an eBook reader this season.

The good news is eBooks are here to stay. The bad news is a lot of them are going to be islands into themselves once the technology shakes out.