By all accounts, the Kindle should be the perfect device for me.
I love to read, but hate the clutter that physical books cause. I often read at night after my partner has gone to bed, but any book or table lamp keeps her awake (unlike a backlit Kindle). And thanks to Overdrive and my public library system, I can borrow thousands of digital books right from home.
But, after multiple attempts with multiple generations of Kindle, I still keep returning to physical books. Despite all of their shortcomings, I continue to borrow and buy physical books, and lug them around through hotels and airports.
It seems that I'm not alone. Physical books still vastly outsell e-books, and the majority of those buying physical books are actually younger readers.
The assumption is that people choose physical books because of beautiful cover design and photography, which is why fiction bestsellers tend to do better on electronic readers (like the Kindle) than highly visual material like cookbooks and children's stories. However, I think it may be more subtle than that.
One of the most influential books on design ever written is Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style". It's well-regarded as the definitive book on how to arrange text on a page, and it goes into an amazing level of detail. There is a section on how the curvature of letters in a font reflects a period in time. There is a lengthy discussion on how to arrange paragraphs on a page, and how it corresponds to scales in music. There is even a review of the five (!) different types of dashes (-, –, —, ——, and ———) and when to use which one.
The point of all these details is that even for books without visuals, designers have a tremendous amount of decisions they can make when designing a book. When all of the decisions are made thoughtfully and carefully, the end result is a book in which the design fades away and your attention is completely on the content of whatever you're reading.
I think this is a tremendously difficult thing to achieve in Kindles or any e-readers. A Kindle takes a piece of text, and with very few options (font, spacing, margins, etc.) it presents the material. It must be an incredible challenge to take all of the thought of a well-designed physical book and translate that to a constrained e-book environment.
And I think that we pick up on that as readers, and find something slightly less pleasing about digital books. We talk about appreciable things like the smell of fresh ink and the feel of paper, but our brain picks up on all of the little design decisions like the curvature of the fonts and the length of the dashes, and subconsciously object if something doesn't feel quite right.
So it's a difficult challenge for e-readers, but also a worthwhile opportunity. While perhaps not all e-books can (and should) be designed with the care of their physical counterparts, there is an opportunity to do this for some of them, for those books that we would love to see come alive however we choose to read them. If this effort were put into place, I have a feeling we would notice.