Kindle DX: Amazon’s newest Kindle DX electronic book reader is a step up from earlier versions – but not a huge one. Meanwhile, Amazon’s recent Orwellian deletion of e-books downloaded by customers – deliciously including Orwell’s “1984” – has upset some owners. And now rival bookseller Barnes & Noble is entering the ring in force. The young market is hotting up.

Online retailer Amazon seems to have stolen a lead. Its Kindle electronic readers, with their special electronic ink screens, are rivaled primarily by Sony’s. But Amazon has the slicker product, helped by its ability to download books wirelessly and a library of more than 285,000 books.

For many human readers, the software versions of books won’t replace the real things lined up on shelves. But the use of electronic readers goes beyond books, and their benefits – instant downloads, lack of bulk, the ability to search, to name a few – are clear.

Amazon's Kindle DX, introduced in May in the US, comes in a bigger 10” by 7” format with a larger screen than earlier models – apparently designed to work better with textbooks and newspapers. It does a few other useful new things, including reading pdf files properly – a boon for anyone with Wall Street research reports to plough through, despite the irritating inability to zoom the display.

But the extra features are offset by the heft of the DX – at 19oz, it’s nearly double the weight of the more compact Kindle 2. Textbooks could turn out to be its forte. But so far, newspapers don’t appear in a format that looks appreciably more appealing than on the smaller screen, at least if the New York Times – which Amazon roped into the DX launch – is anything to go by.

So on balance, the DX is only a modest step up. But Amazon’s devices have certainly helped fuel rapid growth in the e-book market. The segment covered by the Association of American Publishers grew nearly 170 percent in the year to May, with sales running at $11 million in the month; that's relatively modest, but one rough estimate by Gutenberg.com of the broader market around e-books suggests it could hit the $1 billion level for annual sales sometime this year.

The market is likely to continue expanding rapidly as e-books and readers gain a following, even with the occasional snafu. Amazon brought one such on itself in recent weeks when it deleted some books customers had paid for and downloaded. Amazon refunded their money, but removed the books from their Kindles without warning using its wireless synchronization service.

The deleted works included George Orwell’s “1984”. In the book, Big Brother keeps an intrusive, controlling eye on everyone – and protagonist Winston Smith spends his days rewriting history, destroying inconvenient records via the “memory hole”. Naturally, the irony hasn’t been lost on customers and commentators.

Amazon has said the books were illegal copies that found their way into its Kindle store – and that anyway it won’t again delete books in this way. Nonetheless, the incident raises questions about the permanence of libraries built electronically rather than in hard copy.

That’s unlikely to do much to slow the spread of e-books. Barnes & Noble is wading into the market with Tuesday's unveiling of what it says is the biggest electronic bookstore anywhere.

It is claiming 700,000 titles, rising to more than 1m within a year – partly thanks to its deal with Google, which has scanned half a million books that are out of copyright. New titles are priced at $9.99, in line with Amazon.

Moreover B&N appears to be embracing an “anyone but Amazon” strategy. Its books can be downloaded to Windows and Mac computers, and to Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and other devices. The company has also done a deal with Plastic Logic, which is due to release an e-book reader early next year. B&N’s titles apparently won’t work with Kindles – nor with Sony readers. (The Google books can, however, be downloaded to Sony devices.)

When it arrives, the Plastic Logic reader – a large format device like the DX, but lighter and with a touch screen – may help B&N attract readers who find electronic ink screens less tiring than backlit computer and handheld screens. And the sheer size of B&N’s library could threaten Amazon’s position, too.

Perhaps, though, the idea isn’t for everyone. Orwell, a reviewer of books, had this to say: “[T]he prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash … but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.”

His “1984” portrays one kind of nightmare; for him, the prospect of reviewing a million books might well be another.

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