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I remember, back in the day, when the closed online services (CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie, America Online, etc.) touted the ease of finding content on their services as a crushing advantage over the disorganized mess that was the Internet. That appeared, at the time, to be a decisive advantage -- until the development and popularization of the full-text search engines. Remember what a miracle Alta Vista seemed? I think the ebook ecosystem is in a similar state today, where you have your choice of using a closed service (any ebook store) or wandering around the trackless wasteland hoping to stumble over something you want to read. The rise of the search engines changed the Internet and the Web (which are not, by the way, the same thing), and someone could, at any moment, roll out whatever will do the same for ebooks.
Personally, I'm hoping for something like a public version of Amazon's recommendation system. I could train it, as I have Amazon's, by telling it that I liked Lacing Up for Murder and hated Carpe Demon, and it would cross-check to see what other users who felt the same way about those books also liked. There are systems like that for music, etc., already. Someone just has to figure out how to make one work for ebooks, and operate it independently of the content providers. I had some hope for Google doing so once, back before they realized that to run a multi-billion-dollar company, you do in fact have to at least approach being evil. But whoever does it, I think that will be the critical factor.
One thing it should do is allow the user to search for lesser-known authors (less than some floating number of recommendations, perhaps), for indie authors, and various other ways to discover something new. That's one of the things that I've enjoyed about being around MobileRead: the chance to find authors and books I would never have heard of otherwise. I'm sure there are people like me who would eagerly click on the "show me books by people I've never heard of" button.
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