[crich70]

macminer said...There are probably some reasons that, combined together, will cause slow demise of e-book readers. Some of them are listed in the article, like the declining number of people who actually read books, or little real innovation in the world of e-readers. I may add a couple of my own observations, which made me give my Kindle to my son and switch to a tablet instead.

• Being locked to one ecosystem. As much as I like Kindle, I occasionaly read books that are unavailable in its format (like older books that have been scanned and are available on Google books). The same goes for many non-English books. To read these I need a tablet which is not tied to just one e-book ecosystem.

  Amazon isn't the only source of Kindle format books, though I grant you that you can't load an epub onto it and read without first converting the book. Calibre is your friend there.
  
  
  

  I read many academic books. While Kindle is OK for fiction, it is less then ideal for textbooks, academic books and generally non-fiction (because of complex formatting, tables, illustrations, footnotes etc.)

  I grant you that the 6" reader isn't made for such. Some books will always be better read in paper.
  
  

  To make notes I can easily attach a (bluetooth) keyboard to my tablet. This is impossible to do with a Kindle. Also, there is no note-taking app on Kindle, like Evernote or OneNote and the note-taking functionality of Kindle itself is too limited for my needs.

  The Kindle Fire tablet can have a bluetooth keyboard synced with it. And you can make notes with it.
  
  

  Too few ebooks formatted for Kindle use real pages. This makes quoting them very awkward. Conversely, most books available through Google Books have real page numbers.

  Since people use different fonts and sizes of font for their reading based on preference and ability to see it is hard to keep page #'s consistent.
  
  

  PDF support on e-readers is erratic. Some readers will display some PDFs, but they can't be relied upon.

  PDF's were never intended to be an ebook format. PDF stands for Personal Document Format and it was created so that business people could email documents back and forth for printing as needed rather than having to mail them via post or hand deliver them.
  
  

  I seriously considered buying the new Oasis, mainly because of its being waterproof. But the price is so steep for what it can do that I stayed with my tablet, buying a cheap waterproof case (or rather sleeve).

  Of course the new ereader is expensive. The company that makes a given ereader has to make back its investment in the development of a new product. You saw the same thing with DVD players. At first they were hundreds of dollars, now you can pick one up for under $50 at your local dept. store.
  

That said, I hate Google Books being tied to the ADE system, which on the whole is much more restrictive than the Amazon's one, so whenever there's a choice, I still buy books from Amazon.

Different company, different sales model. Some of their books have DRM as well I'm sure just as Amazon's do.