David Streitfeld takes an interesting look at the complicated relationship between digital and physical books in Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind. This part jumped out at me, because it points to a mistake companies often make:

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”

As Barbara Nelson points out in Who Needs Product Management?:

It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for your existing technology.

That’s the mistake that many ebook companies made. They let technology lead, where the better solution is to be led by user needs.