I don't think you understand the point of his post. You certainly missed the last section, titled "Ebooks are inevitable," where he admits that e-books are already better in many ways and are very far from fulfilling their potential. With ebooks, we're still looking at the equivalent of the day after Gutenberg printed his first Bible. His "spec" comparison (like most spec comparisons) is meant to point out where e-readers are deficient, because he wants e-reader development to focus on those deficiencies. We need to decide which paper book "specs" are important and ensure that they get recreated in our new digital world.
The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage.
By the "long view" he's talking about world history, not rereading a book he bought twenty years ago. Most of the texts we have from over a millennium ago had to survive through centuries when nobody cared about them.
Also, I don't want to be rude, but when you follow "tl;dr" with a putative summary, it means you've read the whole thing yourself and want to save other people the trouble of reading it. If you decide something isn't worth reading straight through and just skim it instead, say "tl;dr" and leave the summarizing to people who actually read it.
The "store it on a 5.25 inch floppy" strawman was particularly pathetic. If you care about saving something, you'll keep up with the times in terms of storage.
By the "long view" he's talking about world history, not rereading a book he bought twenty years ago. Most of the texts we have from over a millennium ago had to survive through centuries when nobody cared about them.
Also, I don't want to be rude, but when you follow "tl;dr" with a putative summary, it means you've read the whole thing yourself and want to save other people the trouble of reading it. If you decide something isn't worth reading straight through and just skim it instead, say "tl;dr" and leave the summarizing to people who actually read it.