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 we have cheap and affordable ebooks, 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 happening already with the blogs and online likes.
So, I have been assuming that the ebook reader will mimic the form factor of books: display a page, and maybe make a rustling sound as the page is turned slowly. But the ebooks take so long to arrive for the market that they may skip book emulation entirely and become general purpose browsers/composers. In which case, they are more effective for blogs than for books.
It is my opinion that a good format is more important than the medium. In the physical world, format (e.g. hardcover, small-print soft-cover, and 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 do not ebooks catching on until they really have a format to them. So perhaps that makes a bunch of different ebook reader niches rather than an e-book monolith. Who knows.
eBook can become ubiquitous only of the prices of the book content is 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, every one of my friend of mine has one or two of those. Why? And that is because we all read Russian. And Russian ebooks are dirt cheap in the first place (if not free).
So, yes, in that sense 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.
