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Problems I have with ebooks:
1) Way too expensive to buy. It seems to me that production and distribution of ebooks would be significantly less expensive than hardbacks and even paperbacks. No printing costs, no transportation costs (most are just downloaded from the net), but they sell for more than most paperbacks.
2) DRM. DRM reduces the flexibility of using ebooks. If I buy a paperback or hardback, I am free to give it away or resell it when I have finished reading it. With DRM, it's possible to even lose the right to finish reading the book, if your device hard resets or you have a hard disk failure. Forget about passing it on or recovering any of your purchase price by reselling it when you're done. I currently have a small library of legal .lit books that I can't read on my PDA because I lost my activation files when I updated my ROM and Microsoft won't allow me to reactivate my PDA because I have exceeded my allowable activations for that Passport account. At least I can read them on my laptop, unless somehow I lose the activation on it.
3) Way too many incompatible formats, requiring multiple readers on your device taking up valuable storage space.
As much as I would like to like ebooks, all of these things will have to change before I will find them worthwhile and I don't see any of them changing ever because of the greed of the publishers and distributor. Ideally, there would be a single standard format that would allow authors to distribute their works with reasonable safety from rampant piracy and the publishers and distributors would be eliminated from the equation. Same with music and movies.
EDIT: Now I'll read the article. :)
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