There are two features I wish current e-readers would add (notably Kindle, since that’s the reader I use most often).

  1. A dynamic dictionary for books. I read a lot of genre fiction (fantasy and sci-fi) which uses a lot of invented words. It would be awfully nice if an e-reader could build these words into its dictionary only for that particular book. You could have definitions for place names, magic systems, important people, etc. that would pop up when the word is highlighted, just like the normal dictionary. These definitions could even be crowdsourced to readers, though that may bring up issues of spoilers.

  2. Support for series of books. There are three books in Peter F Hamilton’s “Void” trilogy, but the Amazon titles and descriptions don’t say which are which, and the description for the third book spoils part of the second. Same for disconnected series like Iaian M Bank’s “Culture” novels - they’re not sequels to one another, but how easy is it to find all of them in one place? Not easy. I hate to even think of series with multiple authors contributing, like books in the Cthulhu Mythos or Forgotten Realms settings. I’d love to have a page dedicated to each series with the books in reading order, or failing that, publication order.

These things are small, but would be unbelievably helpful. I’d like to do it myself for a mobile reading app, but I couldn’t be arsed to deal with the nightmare that is eBook publishing. Anyone at Amazon / Apple / etc listening?