Background music would actually be a nice enhancement to some books. But music licensing issues would likely make it impossible to do unless the e-book company also runs a music streaming service. There IS one such company…

What COULD be done would be implementation of an interface that would let the e-reader software talk to your choice of streaming music service so it could play the music from there.

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That said, I am constantly using that sucker and constantly recharging it. I estimate that I’m using that thing easily 8 hours a day.

I wouldn’t mind returning to e-ink and relegating the android tablet to handle non-book stuff. But I would be looking for something 1)with hard buttons, 2)something that supports epub natively via cloud and 3)something that is a bigger form factor than the typical kindle. The Kindle Oasis is barely bigger than the Paperwhite, and yet cost twice as much? Doesn’t compute .

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Also, battery life probably doesn’t concern most users, since mobile batteries are good enough now that recharging isn’t a big hassle. So if the only thing you’re offering is a $100+ device that does nothing but display books, the only selling point seems to be “the screen looks slightly nicer than a regular display”.

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They are no longer novelties. Those who want e-readers have already purchased them: saturated market. As such, declining sales are no surprise.

I am embarrassed to tell how many e-readers I have, but suffice it to say that I have more than one.

There is no need to purchase a new e-reader every year and throw out the old model, as a lot of people used to do with cars. The Nook Simple Touch I purchased 6 years ago is still functioning, though the rubberized surface has taken a beating. That rubberized surface was not one of B&N’s better decisions.

E-reader software could use some improvements. Amazon has been fairly responsive to customer demands, like having AZW3 with traditional page numbers and fonts with adjustable boldface. B&N’s record on improving software in response to customer demands is not as good, such as bold font choices. B&N’s software on collections has improved, though.

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I’d love to see the epaper technology adapted for other purposes. I’d like to see a book-sized epaper display that would get images from an smaller-screen iPhone yards away. I’d love to have a large-screen epaper display that could show the final appearance of books I’ve laying out with InDesign. But neither product exists probably because there’s insufficient interest on the part of the public. Their tablets and smartphones are good enough. A good enough technology people have will always win out of limited one that costs more money for only a slight improvement.
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The real problem with ebooks is the dreadfully inadequate epub format. There’s a wealth of things that digital books could do but don’t because epub is so ill-conceived. Those responsible for it seem to fall into two categories.

1. The geeky, nerdy type for whom hidden, esoteric stuff matters most. They’re the ones who think it a big deal that a recent update to epub downgrades on form of the ebook equivalent of a table of contents. “Who cares?,” I thought when I heard that. That contents data could be included for the next fifty years with no harm done.

2. The visionaries who lack sense. These are the ones who think that digital reading should be accompanied by multimedia, including video scenes and background music. That’s absurd. Videos are expensive to do well. Few writers and publishers can afford to add even a couple of minutes of poorly done video to their books and those who want background music while they read can turn on a radio or join a music service.

I can give an example of what epub should do. You see accordion text on webpages. it allows text to be concealed or revealed as the user choses. It’s far better than the pitful epub workaround, clumsy pop-up windows. It could be used in hundreds of ways to offer additional information in both fiction and non-fiction books, including dealing with graphics. Why isn’t it there? Why do most ebooks still look like the ones who first appeared on Palm devices twenty years ago?

That’s stupid, really stupid, and it’s why ereaders are dying and ebooks languishing. It’s even why Amazon displayed good sense when it didn’t adopt epub but chose to create its own standard.

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