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Originally Posted by SpiderMatt
We've gotten nowhere? And here I thought e-ink devices were making great strides in increasing the popularity of ebooks more than ever before. If the Kindle making the front page of Newsweek is "getting nowhere," then ebooks are doomed no matter what happens. Government getting involved wouldn't make most consumers like ebooks any more than they already do, anyway.
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Actually, the only thing we know about e-book devices is that they are being bought. I'm pretty sure most of the e-ink purchasers have been people who were already reading e-books, and advanced to a new device.
There's been no hard evidence to the fact that the devices are converting large numbers of print readers to e-books... yet. And the number of e-ink readers being sold, and e-books sold through the Kindle, Sony, and other e-book stores, is still incredibly small compared to the sales of print books.
Sure, we've seen an uptick, thanks to better display tech. Sure, Newsweek and others ran an article on a new service hawked heavily by Amazon.com... what respectable news service wouldn't? But it's still small potatoes so far. We should have been here a decade ago, and we're still wrestling with e-babel, incompatible hardware, and unresolved copyright and DRM issues.
If the government had decided to standardize e-books for, say, the education industry--something discussed, yes, a decade ago--we could be looking at a much more developed, cohesive and mature e-book industry today. Thanks to business being allowed to do what they want, we've been treated to progress at a snail's pace.