Ebooks: let's not go the Al Gore's way

I have bought Al Gore's latest book, Our Choice, which is also available as an iTunes App.
The first impact is amazing. The visuals are great, and the look and feel is really pleasing.
However, after the first minutes of fiddling with this product of the ebook making postmodern way, I felt bitterly disappointed.

• First off, the app, without any warning whatsoever, either in the iTunes description or in the app itself, starts downloading extra data. The size of 52 MB mentioned in the description seemed big enough for a book, but I though that the better experience would justify it. Not so. The real size of the application after it finished downloading is 1 GB (ONE GIGABYTE!). And this for a book that preaches about avoiding waste!
• After seeing that, of course, I wanted to search the book for "waste". Only that there is no search function, which makes the ebook pretty much similar to an expensive book on paper.
• Except that it is not on paper, and the difference is clear when you leaf through the beautifully illustrated pages, and suddenly Al Gore's voice booms up from what looked like a picture but is a video. If I were reading next to someone who's sleeping, that would be a nasty surprise.
• No bookmarks, highlighting, word look-up, and all other facilities that users of modern book readers rightfully expect.

If I have to judge by this example, the future of ebooks should be wasteful and without searching facilities, meaning that it is intended for the readers to read it the way the author wants, not the way you want to use it. If it weren't for its loud obnoxious audio interruptions, this ebook could easily compare to medieval parchment books.
Summing up, do we want this example to be the future of ebooks? I don't think so.
Someone may say that within one generation we will have iPads with 1 TB of data, and so I am slowing down the progress of technology. It could be. My first computer had 20 MB of storage and that was 25 years ago. In the intervening years I have gone through the amazement of using a laptop with 200MB, then replaced by progressively bigger ones with 2, 16, 120, 260, and now 512GB. Storage for tablets is following a similar ascension. But even if my iPad had 1TB of storage instead of 16G, I would not want a "book" that starts talking or playing videos to me when I try to read quietly. If I wanted that, I could easily use the Kindle text-to-speech facility, or listen to an audio book.
BTW, the book makes a good job of explaining the problem, but then sucks at the conclusion ("be good, because God said so" or something along those lines), so I felt no regrets when I deleted it from my iPad to leave room for more deserving bytes.