Just to expand on one item noted above -- price. Price, price, price.
Today e-readers are so expensive as to limit the market for e-books tremendously. Nobody I know wants to read a novel on a standard PC screen, Palm TX, or iPhone. You want mainstream volume? We need mainstream e-ink.
Along those lines, as much as I argue against DRM, a really strong DRM should allow a large distributor (e.g. Amazon) to heavily subsidize the e-reader. This is in addition to giving us a real incentive on buying e-books over p-books, not merely matching discount p-book prices. Ths assumes the cost of producing and distributing an e-book are significantly less than a p-book, something I do not know to be a fact but do believe.
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