Actually, the OP is 100% right.
The industry is *not* moving in the way he likes.
It *is* moving away from the needs/interests of hobbyists/enthusiasts. It is, instead, movingtowards the interests of mainstream consumers; away from focusing on reader devices and focusing on the activity of reading and the people themselves.
Not going to even try to say it's good or bad.
It is simply what *is* happening.
For the near term, the focus of the industry has become to ramp up the installed base, to get big enough to be economically viable for the long haul.
Just putting out the best reader you can design and putting up a website is not going to get you very far, now. (Even Amazon sees that; hence their moves to get their readers into 3000+ B&M storefronts. And that's the US alone. Think they're stopping there?)
The game is now price and ubiquity. Price and visibility. Price and simplicity.
Gold-plating readers with (even desirable) features is not going to do the hardware guys much good if the platform they're committed to is marginalized.
Volume is key in this fall/winter of 2010. The platform that intents to survive to 2015 needs to build up installed base now. And fast, not gradually.
The (near) future of eink readers is small and cheap, not big and flexible.
The (near) future of eink readers is appliance-level stability, not drool-worthy betaware.
The (near) future is, for better or worse, determined by two existing products; Kindle and iPad. Anything with less *consumer* appeal than K3 WiFi had better be cheaper. Anything aiming to sell higher than Kindle had better be bulletproof, feature-rich, solidly marketed...and noticeably cheaper than iPad.
That is a hard, hard environment to deal with and the change came upon us practically overnight; 3 months from the Kobo to the K3 Wifi.
Building a competitive reader these days is a tough assignment simply because Kindle WiFi is such a solid competitor. It is a (fairly) feature-rich reader selling at stripper prices. It hits all the mainstream consumer buttons while ignoring all the pundits' conventional wisdom.
Yes, it's a walled garden. It is also easy to use.
Yes, it's built on DRM. It is also cheap to buy.
It ignores annointed standards. It is also available globally which none of the standard-supporting players can claim.
For each stone that the hobbyist/enthusiast/pundits throw at it, Kindle has an answer. They're simply playing a different game.
And, now, just to make things even harder, we have iPad and its followers; a flood of android webpads. If large-format eink has found it hard to compete against iPad at US$499 and up, how are they to compete with Archos' 10in Android tablets at US$300? Or the horde of 7inchers coming at US$200? Suddenly hardware and software can be judged independently. And Kindle is both. As I said, a different game, and their competitors face the choice of either playing by Amazon and Apple's rules or looking for a different playground.
Let's face it; eBook readers have been an immature business for the past three years. We, the readers, have put up with a lot of crap from the vendors and the publishers all in the name of early access to a new tech. It's the price of being pioneers and early adopters. Some of knew this and were waiting for the shoes to start falling. They have. And now we face the ultimate fate of pioneers, to be cast aside once the industry matures.
Yes, the industry is not going where we expected it to go or where we'd want it to go. So?
Tell it to the CPM, Apple II, Atari, Commodore, and BBC home computer pioneers who saw their home computing niche swamped by the economics of PC clones.
Tell it to Atari, Intelivision, and Coleco gaming fans who saw Nintendo and Sega and later Sony change the rues of the game underneath them. (Tell it to the Sony fans so mortally offended that Microsoft would have the unmitigated gall to dare to compete with Sony--and change the rules of what a console should be like.)
Tell it to supporters of wire recorders, 8tracks, Quadraphonic LPs, or Laservision. (I suspect a lot of googling will be required there.)
It's tough being a pioneer.
But this has happened before.
It will happen again.
That's how industries are born.
We can either whine about it or adapt to the new world that is emerging.
And, make no mistake, the game is just beginning.
The ebook industry is now becoming mainstream; wait til it actually *becomes* the mainstream. (About three more years, I'm thinking.)
Soon we'll be waxing nostalgic over the good old days of debating the merits of DRM. Or Epub vs Mobi. Hah! Wait til the rich-content format wars hit next year! Or the Academic Reader wars of 2012!
Even bigger changes are coming and they are coming in ways and from directions we can't even guess.
We're just seeing the end of the beginning; the fun is just starting.