The missing links: ereaders, the iPad, that's it? The device industry is blowing a great opportunity to revolutionize reading.

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WHAT MAKES ME NERVOUS ABOUT EBOOKS AND THE CROP OF EBOOK READERS FROM Apple, Amazon, and Sony, isn't what you might expect. Digital rights management (DRM) and pricing schemes don't worry me. These are mostly imposed by the publishers, and we saw how this played out in music with the market eventually lowering prices and pulling back on DRM. And I'm certainly not worried that ereaders are some sort of move away from physical books and that such a shift endangers the future of libraries. Libraries are about knowledge and facilitation, not artifacts and stuff.

No, what worries me about the recent spate of ereaders is that they're so boring. I actually found myself angry and disappointed after Apple's iPad (www.apple.com/ipad) was announced in January. I'd expected so much more. I'm a little apprehensive about sharing these thoughts because I haven't actually seen iBooks, the reader app that you download onto the iPad and one of the features touted at the iPad launch. For all I know, Apple may well have addressed all of the issues I'm about to raise before it shipped the first batch of iPads this month. If that's the case, Apple, my bad: you're exempt from the following rant. On the other hand, if you haven't done much of anything, what were you thinking?

Apple and Steve Jobs have a reputation for reinventing things. The iPod and iPhone were amazing because they did things I always wanted to do, or they did something I'd been doing and suddenly I realized there was a much better …