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I was fanatically interested in ebooks a few years ago but my interest waned when it became apparent that publishers weren't interested and that we were heading into a no-man's-land of competing formats. Amazon's Kindle initially excited me, but my enthusiasm lasted only a microsecond because I saw the cost: $399.
Years ago I wrote that what most people wanted was a $99 reader that reads MS-reader files. Now I've changed my mind: What most people want is a $99 reader that reads epub files.
The industry keeps chasing after high-dollar devices with their high profit margins, seeking to satisfy its need for profits rather than the consumers' need for an affordable, easy-to-use, compatible device.
I would really like to see the industry come up with a standard that results in a well-formatted ebook. Why is that so hard? And let the reader set a few parameters: left- or full-justified, space between paragraphs or not, paragraph indent, size of type. I read all of these wish lists for new features when the basic feature--properly displaying text--isn't even in place yet!
We have RSS feeds and people are talking about newspapers and magazines and textbooks and large color screens and interactivity and on and on...and we can't even get black text to look right!
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