One thing I would like to see become a standard for e-books is the inclusion of the book’s description near the front of the e-book, in the “front matter”. Probably situated between the colophon and the foreword (before or after the dedication), or even prior to the colophon, after the title page. This would be the description that is normally seen on the rear cover of paperback books and the flaps of hardback covers.
The reason why I think they are becoming increasingly important is, in part, due to services such as Book Bub (there are many such services these days). These advertising and marketing services offer books for free or with special discounts as incentives for readers to acquire the book in the attempt to introduce them to the author and/or the author’s series. Often the reader, after signing up to the service, will receive daily e-mails of books that authors have chosen to sign up with Book Bub, et al., with links to Amazon.com or wherever the book is available.
Obviously, if a reader has even minimally-ranging interests in genres and such, it is impossible to read as fast as they can download the books. Since most of the offers are time-frame-based, you usually cannot wait and download the book at a later time. Sometimes the time frames are as short as a single day special, sometimes for longer periods, including “forever”.
When I first signed up to Book Bub, I ended up downloading about 100 books, most of them freebies. The problem I then encountered was, as I was trying to choose which of those books to read (having stored them all in a Kindle folder), I couldn’t remember why I had chosen that book as a potential choice. The reasons I chose to possibly give the book a chance were fairly far-ranging, and obviously some were of more interest than others, both at the time I chose them, and at the time I may want to read them.
Even if you are not using a Book Bub-like service, sometimes I purchase multiple books as I hear about them, etc., and I run into the same problem.
And usually you cannot tell what kind of book each one is genre-wise based on its title, which, unfortunately, is all you have to go on once it is downloaded to your e-book reader. (for Kindle, anyway) You can always start reading the book and try to get an idea of what it’s about in “the first few pages”, but I don’t like to do that, and it is not always that easy to “decipher”. Plus the reader should not have to do that.
This has led (possibly / probably) to another issue, and that is authors expanding the title of the their e-books to give the reader some notion of what the book is about, or what genre it is in, or what series it is part of, etc., which I generally don’t think is a good idea. I don’t know if authors are using the sub-title portion of the book’s metadata for this, or what.
So, in my case, I was then forced to “stop what I was doing” and go look the book up on Amazon.com, or wherever it is on the Net, and read the description to try to figure out if I was interested in reading the book at that time. Sometimes I feel like reading Sci-Fi, sometimes Zombie stories, sometimes horror, etc. This is really irritating.
I therefore included the description of my book, Katydid, directly off the back cover description of the paperback, which is also what is used as the description on Amazon.com, etc., right at the front of my book to give readers notice as to exactly what they are in for, and to remind them what the book is about. I think this is a good idea for all e-books, and I do hope it becomes a standard.