For almost twenty years, the perfect portable ebook reading hardware has been 5 years away. We’re now down to waiting for a cheap enough, lower power enough paper-quality display with long battery life.

Once the ebooks become cheap and affordable, the medium by which we read will also be the medium by which can write and respond. Reading will eventually become a social act eventually. You can see this already with blogs and the online likes.

So, I have been assuming that the ebook reader will mimic the form factor of books: display a page, and maybe some kind of rustling sound as the page is turned slowly automatically. But it is taking so long for ebooks to arrive for the market that they may skip book emulation entirely and become general purpose browsers/composers. In any case, they are better with blogs than for books.

In my opinion, format matters a whole bunch more than medium. In the physical world, format (e.g. hardcover, small-print soft-cover, magazine, etc.) provides a bunch of cues on the type and depth of the content. Photos placed in the right spots attract our attention immediately. The formats also hints a huge deal about the approximate appropriateness. I personally do not see ebooks catching on until they really have a format to them. Maybe that makes a bunch of different ebook reader niches rather than an e-book monolith.Who knows in the first place.

I feel that for an ebook to be ubiquitous, the content prices must be at an acceptable level. RCA ebook readers have been around for years, but I still do not see people using them on the trains, buses and airplanes. On the other hand, almost everyone of my friend has got one. Why? And that is because we all read Russian. And well, Russian ebooks are plain cheap in the first place (if not free).

So, yes, I do hope ebooks jump directly to supporting blog-like content, otherwise we might wait another twenty years before the perfect ebook hardware emerges and gain mass adoption.

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