[fjtorres]

The thing is, ebooks (and ereaders) as they exist today are perfectly adequate to the needs of the people who matter most: the paying customers and the authors. And neither is terribly interested in any particular evolution of the product.

To some people, ebooks are books minus tree pulp and nothing else.
To others ebooks are stories wrapped in technology.

To the former, nothing less than an absolute adherence to print standards and customs will ever be acceptable; to the latter, the wrapping is of the essence and it doesn't matter if the narrative gets mangled in the process.

Two extremes; ebooks as digital paper and ebooks as, effectively, games.
The market has not been friendly to either.

Simply put, commercial ebooks are primarily about the story. People care about typos and ocr errors; they don't particularly care about drop caps, white space, ligatures or kerning. Those are remants of the print age; people are a lot more interested in getting immersed in the narrative than whether the story is rendered according to some arbitrary standard left over from the molten lead era. It all boils down to personal preference and where ebooks shine is in letting the user set their own standards, whether it be no paragraph indents with an added blank line in between, ragged right, or no margins on-screen. (Somewhere out there somebody is happily reading ebooks in comic sans, ragged right, with no white space and auto scroll. It's their eyeballs.)

Similarly, most people see the whiz-bang "enhancements" in the digital effects-laden editions more as distractions than value adds to the core narrative, not unlike the DVDs that ship with commentary tracks that most people simply ignore.

To both camps, the market is saying: just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. And if the market shrugs or cold shoulders a "feature" nobody is going to spend much money implementing it. So as long as the bulk of ebook money comes from genre narrative prose neither the publishers nor platform holders are going to waste time and effort on issues that consumers of narrative prose don't particularly care about.

Ebooks are a consumer technology and consumer behavior is going to dictate how fast and where the industry goes. It might pay to look at other similarly consumer-driven narrative industries (video and console gaming) where genuine technical advances have stalled simply because consumers are perfectly satisfied with "good enough".

As Adam Osbourne said a generation ago: adequacy is sufficient.