Those of you who have had the opportunity to use your e-reader for some time are familiar with the advantages of using those devices to consume content. Platforms such as Kindle let readers get more out of their reading experience and share content and highlights with others too. Richard MacManus @rrw summarizes these positive points beautifully. But not all is rosy when it comes to e-books. The industry is yet to hit maturity, and there are major issues e-reader manufacturers, publishers, and authors need to deal with.

eBook Prices Are Too High

This goes without saying. Asking folks to pay $9.99 (or $14.99) for e-books just seems too much. It’s not as if Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad are free e-book readers. Besides, you do not really own your e-book when you can’t sell it or share it with others easily. I would not be complaining if all e-books were priced in an affordable fashion. Unfortunately, some e-books are selling for almost as high as their paperback version. Is that fair?

You Can’t Sell Your E-books

Going back to the previous point, e-book buyers simply can not sell their e-books. That means you are stuck with what you have bought forever. That is going to be a huge turn off especially for college students.

Can Your E-Reader Last

Kindle, iPad, and Nook are all great devices. But they all have a limited life-time. Your device may last you 1 year or 5 years. But you will have to keep buying e-readers to continue enjoying your e-books (unless you do not mind reading your e-books on your computer).

Amazon signaled a shift in its Kindle strategy when it introduced KDK a while ago. The platform was going to stay closed to a select developers, but the company did promise decent games and apps for Kindle. Just a few days ago, Amazon finally unveiled its first two games for Kindle. These games are mostly word games and are not exactly designed for gaming addicts. But they do appeal a lot to die-hard Kindle fans as Amazon forums are filled with positive messages from excited Kindle fans.

Free games are fun, but they do not tell us much about Amazon’s app strategy. Let’s take Apple. The company may have not had the best smart-phone on the market a few years ago, but it relied on its killer development kit and iTunes to encourage developers to bring their innovative ideas/products to iPhone. Paid apps can work for Amazon too. But can Amazon Kindle handle anything too complicated?

When Amazon announced Kindle Development Kit a while ago, it did promise us some exciting new applications. It has been a while, but Amazon has finally released a couple of games for Kindle. Shuffled Row and Every Word are two free games that Kindle owners can install on their devices right now. Both of these games are word games. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but Kindle is not a gaming device, remember?

I first wrote about the need for Amazon to introduce an app store in 2008. At the time, we were all hoping for a color-screen and somewhat more sophisticated next generation Kindle. Unfortunately, KDK does look a bit limited at this point. Kindle’s App Store (if we can call it that) won’t be beating iTunes anytime soon. Jeff Bezos does not consider Kindle to be anything more than an e-book reader, so trying to out-Apple Apple is not a part of Amazon’s agenda at this point.

E-book readers such as Kindle and iPad are not that hard to use. They are designed in a way that almost anyone can use them. Of course, not everyone finds using these devices easy. Knowing a few tips and tricks to get more out of these devices never hurts either. If you are a proud iPad or Kindle owner and want to learn a few tips and tricks, these e-reader guides are worth a look:

iPad For Dummies: the title of this book may not be that tempting, but this book does cover a lot of things on iPad. It shows you how to get the most out of your iPad (reading, playing with apps, …).

Kindle DX For Dummies: a practical book that shows you how to use your Kindle DX, create content for it, access e-mail, use its Internet connection, and do all kinds of other things with it.

Kindle Shortcuts: a handy e-book that covers a lot of Kindle-related information. It shows you how to get more out of your Kindle and lets you know where to get content for your device. May not be for advanced Kindle users though.

Amazon has already shown that it is dedicated to keeping Kindle among the top e-readers on the market. But it has not forgotten about the software side of things. Amazon has just released an update for Kindle app for iOS that makes it work like a charm on iPhone 4 and improves its performance in search, switching, and other areas (keeping it among the best e-reader apps on iPhone/iPad).

For starters, Kindle for iPhone and iPad is still a free application (not suggesting that Amazon planned to make it a paid app). The iPhone version has been updated to work fast on new iPhones (support for fast-switching). The search functionality has been improved too. Users can now search for things using Google, Wikipedia, or the app’s built-in dictionary. It may not be perfect (in-app browser would be much better), but it’s a start.

Amazon is selling e-books like hot-cakes. The company has been so successful with its Kindle strategy that it is now selling more e-books than hard-cover books. It was bound to happen. While Amazon wants us to believe that most of its success is due to its Kindle device, one has to applaud Amazon for realizing that the future is software and not hardware. Amazon Kindle hardware may have converted a lot of people from paper-books to e-books, but there is a limit to what Amazon can achieve by focusing on its hardware business.

Jeff Bezos sounds very happy with what Amazon has accomplished so far:

We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189…. In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing, when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months.