The two main players right now in the electronic book reader market are Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN).

While Sony helped pioneer the market for e-book readers using advanced electronic ink technology, it has fallen behind Amazon in the race to transform electronic readers into mass market devices. Sony’s Reader, launched in Japan in 2005, was first to market in the United States in 2006. But Amazon’s Kindle has been a surprise success since its first version was launched two years ago.

But Sony is fighting back – hard. In a direct assault on Amazon in the e-book market, Sony announced that it would convert its e-book store to the open EPUB format by the end of the year. EPUB is an industry standard e-book format that can be read on multiple devices. Amazon currently sells e-books that can only be read on its Kindle device or Kindle software, effectively

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Read Any Good E-Books Lately?

by Tony Daltorio, Research, Investment U

There is a thrilling, real-life business drama being written as you read this article; a drama revolving around the battle for dominance in the electronic books industry.

Some of the major “characters” in this story include: Sony ADR (NYSE: SNE), the company that pioneered the market; Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), which brings in most of its business through selling books; and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), the proverbial “800 pond giant” that may end up dominating the industry in the end… despite having yet to enter it.

It’s quite a cast of characters for investors to choose among.

Nothing beats a good book, so we’ll take a “read” on the market for electronic books and electronic book readers. and see if any of the chapters contain profitable

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Shares of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) advanced more than 5% today as first-quarter earnings, announced late Thursday, were ahead of Wall-Street expectations.

The online retailer reported earnings per share of 41 cents, which topped the consensus by almost 37%.

Meanwhile, revenues grew 18% year over year to $4.9 billion, thanks to better-than-expected sales of electronic book-reading device, Kindle.

Amazon said revenues during the second-quarter are expected to range between $4.3 billion and $4.75 billion, a growth of 6% to 17% compared to second-quarter of 2008.

Full-year consensus earnings estimates have moved up a penny over the past 30 days to $1.47 per share, as 2 analysts out of 28 raised expectations.

The Zacks #2 Rank ("Buy") company is trading on extraordinarily high volume of approximately 19 million, compared to average volume of about 7.6 million.

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