I hope if you know spanish you can read my essay about "the end of books made of paper" http://minid.net/2013/02/07/el-inevitable-fin-de-los-libros-... if you don't I think Google Translate will do a good justice. Basically, it is clear that the concept of books will be difficult to eradicate. I find it hard to believe that we lose this great cultural format; the compilation of writings with a particular objective. Reports will continue to exist, but books, as a format, they will dissapear on paper format but they will continue on digital. Because of this, it is probably that some things will change.
I have an startup right now about resuming books on audio. It's becoming increibly popular among the new generations: they don't want to read an entire book, they want the best highlights of it. Maybe in the future we will face a change in the format we write books: ultra resumed, different grammar, different format.
> herky-jerky scrolling because the programmers do not understand how to write concurrent display code
Yes, PDF readers are bad.
What makes the problem worse is that the PDF itself, is sometimes a resource-intensive format as well. Finding information from a modern datasheet is a pain, finding information from a scanned 300 MiB datasheet from the 1980s is real pain. Lots of rendering.
None of the problem (other than keyword searching is not available) exists in a physical book, the human brain is a great pattern-recognizing machine. Nothing beats flipping through the pages and using fingers as markers yet...
What I mean by concurrent display code is the display of the pdf file is always up-to-date even when the renderer cannot display the data fast enough.
The trick is to abandon the current render whenever the position in the file changes, and start a new render.
I did this back in the 1970's (!) when I designed and built a 24x80 glass terminal. The 6800 microprocessor simply could not keep up with 9600 baud serial data coming in. So what I did was hook an interrupt handler to the serial port, which stored the incoming characters into a 24*80 circular buffer.
The display renderer would start at the beginning of the circular buffer, writing characters to the display buffer. If more characters entered the circular buffer which would invalidate the display, the renderer would simply start over.
Whenever the data coming in paused slightly, the display would catch up almost faster than you could see.
It worked great!
I since incorporated the same idea into the MicroEmacs text editor in the 1980s, meaning the editor display was always crisp and responsive despite running on an 8088. (Other editors would fall behind, and when you took your finger off the auto-repeat page-down key they'd eventually catch up. This behavior is what most PDF readers exhibit.)
There are a number of PDF readers around, and as an academic who spends most of the day working with references in PDF format, I can tell you that Zathura combined with a tiling window manager and a little shell scripting (for temporary bookmarks) can do most of what you say you want.
Thanks for the reference. BTW, I've now and then sent these lists to PDF reader makers. None have ever paid any attention nor acknowledged it. So I complain here :-)
Probably PDF is not the best format. EPUB can be quite good. I'm an EPUB reader and I never found any impediment. Most of the examples you mention, like "cannot display pages side by side in full screen (you know, like a book can)" are not really useful for reading, but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram. The rest of the points I think are improvements to ebook experience that can be achieved but has little to do with the old book format.
> but more for admiring an illustration or a diagram
Consider the aspect ratio of most monitors. It's ideal for side-by-side viewing of pages. Also, most books that have mixed illustrations, pictures, and text are designed for side-by-side viewing.
This, and all of the other shortcomings I mentioned, are technically very easy to accomplish. For example, Foxit does support side-by-side display, but if you switch it to full-screen display, that goes away. It's almost like they had to work extra hard to make side-by-side not work.
Side-by-side is also very useful for "flipping" through a book. You can do it literally twice as fast as page-by-page.
Yes, I agree, but they're just lack of features, has little to do with the nature of an ebook vs paper book. People is nostalgic biased and that quickly goes away once you give them the convinience.
I have an startup right now about resuming books on audio. It's becoming increibly popular among the new generations: they don't want to read an entire book, they want the best highlights of it. Maybe in the future we will face a change in the format we write books: ultra resumed, different grammar, different format.