The new ebook wave

I've come back from Frankfurt last week with a mixed feeling about what is hapening in the publishing industry.
At the last year fair the train that everybody was running for was Print On Demand (POD). Everywhere on the fair floor there was a conference on that subject.
This year the lord of the game was the "mighty" ebook. Yo be fair I can't believe what is happening. It is something I am expecting for the last 5 years and still not sure that it is relly happening.
It looks like we are living again the ebook buble from the begining of this century. Remember the Rocket and Gemstar and goReader and the begining of the OeB Forum. It was the golden age but it was a flop, a big one from teh business point of view.
Technologicaly we are not at all more advanced now than at that time. The only difference is that now we have EPUB as almost de facto format and the ePaper for the screens.
There were at least 6 devices presented in this year Frankfurt Book Fair. Neither of them was a revolution. Most of them are good enought to read a book but that's not all. It looks like many are producers are loking for a novel aproach (dual screens, one for reading and the other for navigation, split screen and so on). They do not realize that those devices are stil not cheap enought for the mass market. How many people you know that will pay 250-500Euro for a device that most probably will be obsolete in 6 months and will be forgoten in the drawer after one year.
One more thing ... there is no business proposition for publishers. Nobody came with something similar with what Jobs made for the music industry with the iTunes + iPod duet.
There are many other issues that have to be considered.
More on that in a future post.
Good night.