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It always amazes me how Mobileread forums are so satisfied with the current state of the art. I often wish for improvement in ereading and I am only a light reader compared to many on the forum (average about 70-80-ish books per year, maybe 75:25 fiction:non-fiction) so surely it must affect others even more than me.

Things I think have gotten worse:

- I don't many of the hardware choices that have become popular. Sony had many metal bodied readers and often had integrated covers and/or cover attachment points, and without the creases for propping up the reader (which I find make the devices annoying to hold). Clicky page turn buttons are something else I miss; I even liked the scroll wheels that some devices had. Variety in colour too (who decreed that ereaders have to be black?)

I like infra-red touch sensors over most of the capacitive touch in modern readers because the capacitive ones have an extra layer of matte plastic and I find that reduces the clarity of the text.

- DRM is getting harder to strip. There was a short period of time when DRM could be removed from the products of most book stores, but now you need to be careful of how you download and/or allowing certain software to update etc.

- Advertising. I've already paid for the hardware, and I'm (theoretically) a captive of your bookstore. Do you really need to advertise to me on device too? I wouldn't mind a recommendation on hitting end of book, but I really dislike seeing ads on the home screens.

- Book formatting. I think we are in a strange middle stage where book formatting isn't good enough to do many typesetting tasks but where it is too complicated for many lay people to take on. Compare to making a Peanut Press format book, or even original Mobipocket. Modern epub can be very complex but still can't do many things that WordPerfect or MS Word could do in the 1980s.

Things that still suck and haven't been fixed:

- Bookstores closing. I've survived a few bookstore closings and it still sucks every time. Now that I have learned to de-DRM every book I buy it sucks less, but it still is annoying and inconvenient at a minimum.

- Devices still slow. I don't mean refreshing the eink display. I mean responsiveness in all other aspects. Like rotating manga pages. Or scrubbing/flipping pages. Or selecting text. Or operating the UI quickly. Or scaling large images. Or opening books made with large files (e.g. I have seen omnibuses where each book was a single html file inside the epub).

- categorization and search. Things took a big leap forward with incremental search, but it's still not all that easy to find what you are looking for in a large library. And what are your alternatives? There's no good on-device tag system. Few readers I know of allow nested or overlapping categories. Paging through a large library is pretty slow, especially since most readers are determined to show you only a few books per screen (and some even omit a text version of the title, forcing you to recognize the cover). No reader I know of allows you to have playlists or to-be-read stacks. Series categorization is missing or inconsistent. Publishers often aren't consistent with author naming and book metadata.

- desktop software still blech (I'm looking at *you* Kobo...)