Nifty article at Mobile Opportunity blog:
The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. His five points about why they failed, in brief:
- Not enough ebooks.
- Ebooks too expensive.
- The hardware form factor was wrong.
- Periodical problems.
- Poor marketing.
In my opinion, 2 & 4 are still serious problems; 3 & 5 are nuisance slowdown factors. #1 has mostly been fixed--not that everything's available as an ebook, but there's *plenty* of ebook content--some of which smacks into 3: it's nearly impossible to read a detailed tech manual with graphs on an iPod's screen.
( Thinky thoughts go behind a cut tag. )