In our digital age, miniaturization rules. This is a welcome thing –in most cases. Squeezing two billion transistors onto a small chip? All good. Squeezing an enormous printed textbook down to iPhone-size? Not so good.

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

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There’s a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon (AMZN) doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle, there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there’s Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

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I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character. Furthermore, the novels have gone out of print, and are only available from amazon.com as used books.

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