My hot spot on the top 10 list is the lack of availability in multiple formats. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written to publishers requesting this. While they always acknowledge the communication, their responses always give me the impression that what they actually heard was “blah, blah, blah”.

My e-book stores are ereader.com and their parent, fictionwise.com. After much experimenting with e-book readers, my personal preference is the Ereader software as my preferred e-book reader. It really does everything I need it to do for desktop reading as well as for reading on the go. Being forced to use MobiPocket or MSReader or Adobe, etc. because the Ereader format is not offered by the publisher just makes no sense to me. The publisher has effectively handicapped themselves right out of the starting gate and greatly increased the chances that I’ll bypass their book in favor of another offered in my choice of reader.

Kerry D’s additional 3 points are also excellent especially in these economic times. I have yet to see a publisher give an explanation of the reason why e-books are priced the same as print books. Perhaps they don’t want to confirm their profit is higher? And why does the e-book price for some publishers (not all) not drop when a hardcover or trade print book is released as a paperback? Why am I as an e-book reader expected to pay the hardcover/trade book price forever??? My solution – don’t buy the book in either print or e-book. A no win situation for everyone.

I don’t believe any one e-book format will ever be acceptable to everyone so why not have multiple formats to maximize selling opportunities?

I spend the majority of my disposal income on books and 95% of that is for e-books. Rarely do I purchase print books anymore. When I do buy print, used book stores are great resources and how does that help either the author or the publisher? It is, however, reality.

Thank you for a great topic.

That said, I agree with Gerald that in reference books and collections I’ve missed it. It would be nice to be able to hop to “this” chapter in my computer reference book (or even a diet book) or “that” story in an anthology (especially when the first story I want to read is the last one in the ebook).

The Table of Contents should be “active” meaning all chapter titles actually LINK to THAT chapter.

General toss-out question: Is this important to others, too? I like this feature myself, but does anyone else?

Since DailyLit sends books in installments via email or RSS, not all of the items in the list apply to us. But, I thought I’d chime in because we do offer many of these features:
1. Eternal Bookshelf: Our readers can easily resend installments of books to themselves. Many of our books are free, though, so folks can read them as often as they’d like.
3. Buy for a Friend: We offer a gifting feature that allows folks to gift any DailyLit book (even free ones) and include a personalized message for their friend.
4. Pay by PayPal: We’re working on adding PayPal–something our readers have asked for–but we’ll continue to offer payment by credit card too.
7. Wishlists: We recently launched BookLists, another feature our readers had requested. BookLists allow our readers to create a list of the books they’re planning to read on DailyLit as well as a list of their favorite books–or any other list they’d like (for instance, I recently made a list of the best Halloween books). We also display all the books our Members are reading/have read on their profile pages.
10. DRM: This is a contentious issue, and we’re sensitive to both sides–readers on one hand and on the other authors/publishers who (not unfairly) want to protect their content. We’ve tried to balance both sides by using other methods (including the serialization format) that allow us to make our installments DRM-free.

Here’s how we handle a couple other issues that have come up in the comments:
-Pricing: We’re very sensitive to our readers in terms of pricing. We also have more than 700 books available completely free, which we hope encourages folks to give ereading and DailyLit a try.
-Software/hardware incompatibility: We use existing email/RSS technology, so our books are available on any device on which you can read email or RSS (desktop, laptop, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.)

@Maya/Patron Saint of Late Adopters
More than $150/month on ebooks? Wow! And they say folks don’t read anymore!

@Kerry Blaisdell
If you’re looking for more portability you might check out DailyLit. Our books can be read wherever you get email or RSS, including on smartphones like the Treo.

Thanks so much for this post, Jane, and thanks to all of the folks who have commented so far. It’s an interesting conversation for everyone and it’s always great to get feedback.

Which is one of the reasons I like the new Samhain/MBAM platform so much. When I was on hols, I was able to log on and download the books that I hadn’t read yet, instead of mass e-mailing them to my Gmail account.