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Originally Posted by Shaggy
What you're saying is that the current implementation of eBooks hasn't matured yet, because it's still in it's early days. I don't think that's necessarily a problem with the idea of eBooks though. All of the points you make could certainly be solved with a more mature technology and implementation of that technology.
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I expect so. It's not a matter of "ebooks can't be as good as pbooks;" it's just that ebooks as they currently stand, are lacking some features of pbooks. One of those is a good way to display them for easy selection.
And right now, that seems to be pretty low on the software development list--the best we're likely to find in the near future is an iPhone-like approach, where each ebook is assigned an icon, which are all the same size & shape. And as soon as that becomes possible, you run into the customizing issue--do you use publisher-provided icons, or user-set icons? (Obviously, publisher-provided books would come with icons, but converting them to another format would allow the end user to change the icon.)
Other missing features, like "ebooks can't be held open to three pages at once so you can flip between chapters to compare details," are also tech issues. I expect they'll eventually be solved--AFTER we either settle on a single format, or develop software that moves between different formats smoothly enough to allow annotations and other changes to be 'ported as well.