It’s been obvious for a while that the Amazon Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle 2 would eventually face stiff competition, both in terms of hardware platform and software/services design and availability. The competition, however, has taken a while to materialize, in part because it’s hard to get a bunch of competitors to decide on e-book formats, DRM, sales questions, etc., etc.

So, the news today about the Google Editions e-book store is big because its presence in the market addresses some of the fundamental content availability questions regarding e-readers.

I’m just excited that there will be a legitimate competitor to Amazon in the e-book space, although we’ll see whether this all works out well for consumers….