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Earlier today, I was thinking that a smart implementation of multitouch will make e-readers feel more "browsable" like real books are. Right now, I can take an anthology of poetry, open it in the middle and and flip around randomly until I see something that looks interesting. Imagine if I could do something like that on a screen.
Example:
I open an ebook and get the title screen by default, but I want to go right to the middle so I use a "pinch together" gesture with my thumb and forefinger to "close the book." However, this doesn't take me back to the library menu, it gives me an image of the closed book oriented so that the spine and the front and back covers are facing away from me and the pages are slightly fanned out. Now I can put my finger on an arbitrary spot in the middle of the book and swipe to have it open to that page.
After that, I can leaf through the book quickly using one finger for single page turns, two fingers for turning 5 pages, and three fingers for turning 20 pages. When I get to a poem with long lines that wraps in a way that looks ugly, I can use a twist gesture to make the screen go from portrait to landscape mode (motion sensors that do this are obnoxious for e-ink).
Anyway, people dismiss multitouch, but it has the potential to make getting around an e-book feel much more intuitive—especially for non-linear or "episodic" forms like newspapers, magazines, reference/textbooks, or anthologies.
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