Quote:
Originally Posted by FJames
I think there's plenty of scope for innovation.
The display contrast on current e-readers is not as good as ink on paper, so there's plenty of room for improvement.
The standard 6-inch screen size is smaller than a paperback book page and shows less text. Give us more screen and less wasted bezel!
The lack of color is disappointing for book covers and internal illustrations, and for comics. Color e-ink displays are in the pipeline, but not here yet.
The latest Kindle is moving to a more responsive capacitive-touch screen instead of IR, and all the new phones have a much wider suite of touch gestures (the new BlackBerry 10 OS is especially interesting).
Sony and Kindle have audio, but they haven't made use of it for voice controls (like Apple's Siri or Google's voice search). They support text-to-speech, but it needs a lot of improvement.
You can't zoom in book illustrations like maps and pan around currently.
Could you make a folding e-ink display so you could close it like a book?
etc
etc
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Without going into anything technical about what is possible and not possible with the current display technologies, I think the critial issue is that for the most part, the innovations you describe are all hardware. Lets take the example of improvements in the e-ink display. There is a limited number of suppliers of the e-ink displays and they provide displays to all the manufacturers of e-readers. There is little incentive for them to limit the sales of their displays to one manufacturer, so the displays will be available to all.