There are three huge problems that e-books haven't solved, which has been holding them back. First, consumer surplus. (Read this if you haven't: http://www.joe

There are three huge problems that e-books haven't solved, which has been holding them back. First, consumer surplus. (Read this if you haven't: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...) Printed books use different editions and market availability to segment the market and bring in a significant amount of consumer surplus revenue. e-books have very weak mechanisms to capture consumer surplus, and that represents a huge potential loss of revenue. In theory it might be possible to make that up on the other end with higher volume (see, for example, steam sales and humble bundles) but so far e-book sales models have been too constrained to enable that to happen very often. Second, commodity pricing. This is a big problem across the board in a lot of media (games, movies, music, etc.) but e-books have just doubled down on the same model. Books are not like dried beans, you don't just go to a store and buy books by the pound, but that's the model the industry has increasingly been rushing towards. With only popularity as the sole determinant of total revenue. This is a massively flawed model that hurts many talented writers and perverts the market in unhealthy ways. Third, ownership. People with physical books can gift them to others, or sell them, or loan them. They can let their friends, their children, their other relatives, or their family's friends borrow them and read them. They are a profound asset of learning and shared culture. An e-book, however, is still by default a jealously guarded personal possession that cannot be easily loaned, sold, gifted, or inherited. Given the importance of books, this is a profound disadvantage of e-books. Fourth, vendor lock-in. The average user experience with e-books represents a substantial dependency on a particular corporation (such as Amazon). If, say, Amazon went out of business it could be especially difficult to gain access to ones Amazon purchased e-books. Imagine, for example, some sort of world-wide disaster, and now there are no more new kindles, no more Amazon, etc. What happens when your one device storing all your books finally dies? This is similar to the ownership problem. Buying an e-book today is partly making a bet that the company that sold you that e-book will be around for as long as that book is relevant. Given the history of both corporations and of books, that's actually not a very smart bet. e-books have a lot of short-term advantages but they have a lot of long-term disadvantages, at least as they exist today. That's not an intractable problem but it's one that so far the big powers in the e-book world have been deaf to hearing.