If you had asked me six months ago if there was much choice in ebook reading devices I would have had to say no. Apart from Sony's dedicated ebook machine your only other options were your pc, cumbersome at best, or Palm-type organisers, which will do the job but aren't exactly ideal.

Now the market has changed dramatically and I expect it to change even more. All because of the Amazon Kindle.

It's not that the Kindle ebook reader is perfect. It is very clever, it is arguably the best thing out there, but it is flawed nevertheless and we'd expect to see improvements in the next version.

It's not that the Amazon Kindle is cheap either. As I write this it's about $50 more expensive than the Sony Reader which itself is hardly pocket change at around $300 although this may come down.

The reason that Kindle changes the market is because it is Amazon's. They not only have the ebook reader, they have the ebook titles as well and the clout to ensure that top publishers like Simon & Shuster and most of the others from the best seller list are making their titles available.

Which means other manufacturers will come into the market too. Because now there really is an ebook market rather than a lot of unrealized potential. Sure we've had ebooks for getting on for a decade but most of the successful ones have been in the "make money online" or "internet marketing" field.

Now we have mass market ebooks. We're starting to see people using ebook reading devices a on the plane and on the train. While it's not going to have the saturation of the mobile phone I believe we're nevertheless going to see quite explosive growth and as with anything else, if you've got a hungry market then suppliers will come along to feed it!

I think the next six to twelve months are going to be very exciting times in the ebook reader market. I don't think we'll see anything substantially cheaper, unfortunately that's not how these things work, but I do think we'll see greater choice.

I have to admit, my money's still on the Kindle though.