I think its early in the market, so I'm disappointed that no one is pushing forward in this sector. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are selling the devices in order to sell the books, which is fine, but e-readers ultimately have to have intrinsic value rather than being merely a portable vending machine.
I just finished my first page 1 through page 290 (when held portrait mode) book on the device that infuriates toddybottom, and I enjoyed the reading - some of which was outdoors and meant I had to play with the angles to minimize the glare. Once settled in, I was taken out of the experience by a page which began with an orphan. I've also struggled with 8-1/2 x 11 pdfs not really fitting well and using Calibre to convert them to e-pub format makes the layout worse.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker looks beautiful, but it's 250 MB per week.
The opportunity is for a reader that leads the way in terms of a good display, a non-proprietary layout, text and graphics encoding, and integrated tools which allows publishers to design to the medium. In addition, there should be digital ways to annotate, highlight, and dogear the books. Whether the economics, today, support such a device and software, I don't know.
I hope someone will come back and innovate in the sector, once the tablet frenzy has subsided and people start to think about where else there's money to be made. People will pay more for a better reading experience. The question is can manufacturers make it, software coders write it, sales channels be open to it, and content producers stock for it?
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