The obstacles in e-book displays are color and resolution, basically. Researchers at Xerox PARC have been studying this for years, and they've determined that to get the "book look," the display needs to hit two goals: the background must be paper white (a soft, muted look compared to nearly all monitors and LCDs), and--here's the real kicker--the screen must be at least 200 dots per inch. You can do it in pure black and (paper) white, but that resolution is two or three times that of common LCDs.
The other kicker--strictly from an interface standpoint--is how you make an e-book as physically light and as easily manipulated as a paper book. It may sound trivial, but coming up with a quick and intuitive way to "turn pages" one at a time in either direction, flip around randomly, set bookmarks, and flip to that cool scene somewhere a quarter of the way through the book to show it to your friend, and to make all those tasks as easy as they are with a paperback, isn't that trivial after all, when you think about it.
And all this needs to be done at an attractive price point. Personally, I don't think real books are going to have to worry much until you can get such a reader at any bookstore for under $50, and until e-books themselves are no more than half the cost of a paperback. (Really. Those assumptions mean it takes 15 book for the e-book to get a monetary advantage. If the e-book reader is "only" $150, that becomes 44 books. For a casual reader who only buys a half-dozen paperbacks a year)
Of course, this hasn't gotten to the licensing agreements, which I think are going to represent a really serious battleground. Publishers seem to want to expand copyright into "usageright": because digital works are so easy to copy compared to works on physical media, they're trying to sharply restrict the ability of purchasers to use the copy of the work they've purchased. There are going to be a lot of fireworks flying about this for years--and until they settle down, I don't think normal books are going to face much serious competition. Meanwhile, e-books will continue to primarily be reference materials that can benefit from computer searching and indexing.
The obstacles in e-book displays are color and resolution, basically. Researchers at Xerox PARC have been studying this for years, and they've determined that to get the "book look," the display needs to hit two goals: the background must be paper white (a soft, muted look compared to nearly all monitors and LCDs), and--here's the real kicker--the screen must be at least 200 dots per inch. You can do it in pure black and (paper) white, but that resolution is two or three times that of common LCDs.
The other kicker--strictly from an interface standpoint--is how you make an e-book as physically light and as easily manipulated as a paper book. It may sound trivial, but coming up with a quick and intuitive way to "turn pages" one at a time in either direction, flip around randomly, set bookmarks, and flip to that cool scene somewhere a quarter of the way through the book to show it to your friend, and to make all those tasks as easy as they are with a paperback, isn't that trivial after all, when you think about it.
And all this needs to be done at an attractive price point. Personally, I don't think real books are going to have to worry much until you can get such a reader at any bookstore for under $50, and until e-books themselves are no more than half the cost of a paperback. (Really. Those assumptions mean it takes 15 book for the e-book to get a monetary advantage. If the e-book reader is "only" $150, that becomes 44 books. For a casual reader who only buys a half-dozen paperbacks a year)
Of course, this hasn't gotten to the licensing agreements, which I think are going to represent a really serious battleground. Publishers seem to want to expand copyright into "usageright": because digital works are so easy to copy compared to works on physical media, they're trying to sharply restrict the ability of purchasers to use the copy of the work they've purchased. There are going to be a lot of fireworks flying about this for years--and until they settle down, I don't think normal books are going to face much serious competition. Meanwhile, e-books will continue to primarily be reference materials that can benefit from computer searching and indexing.