5 Reasons Why Ebooks Aren't There Yet

On Wired’s (@wired) epicenter (@epicenterblog), John C. Abell (@johncabell), Wired.com's New York editor, gives his reasons why ebooks are fundamentally flawed:

1) An unfinished ebook isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.

3) Notes in the margins help you think.

4) Ebooks are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.

5) Ebooks can’t be used for interior design.

About the last point, Abell says

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

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Yes, some similar opinions were voiced about the horse x the automobile, and so on. The bottom line is that you can't stop change. Things change, whether we like them or not, and e-books are part of this change. You could say the same thing about letters and e-mail. You can treasure a letter, re-read it, hold it, smell it. And yet this doesn't change the fact that most of us communicate via e-mail these days.
— P
Let's set aside the fact that horses continue to serve humans in many parts of the world. The wrong-headed sentiment that "things change" does not account for the relationship between human activity and whatever one defines as change. Change isn't something that happens to us. I believe the symbolic capital of books will give way as book culture loses its grip on our collective works and another symbolic capital (like owning an iPad or something) will rise to takes its place. If, that is, such capital is important to how you make meaning from your world. More materially, when eBooks allow me to write in the margins with a stylus, or when I am assured that the version I am reading hasn't been doctored from the author's original text, or that the the distributor can't dissapear books from my library that don't fit the cultural criteria of the time (all of which is possible to do) then maybe I will take another look. There is a difference between owning and reading a book and looking at a facsimile of one on a screen.
— Pete Scisco