Well, I suppose here we could go into the fifty year old (older?) debate about comics not getting any respect in North American bookshops anyway.
Well, sorta; the things we now call "graphic novels" go back at least to Rhymes With Lust, but reprint collections being sold in stores is really a 1980's phenomenon.
I don't know that I'd say comics don't get respect in North American bookshops at this point; they've all got comics sections. Granted, "comic books" is still treated like a genre, but a hell of a lot more people are buying the likes of Scott Pilgrim, Walking Dead, and Watchmen at Barnes and Noble than their local comic shops.
(Oddly, the local B&N has Walking Dead tucked away in a corner and a bunch of DC & Marvel books displayed prominently. That probably falls under the problem of people associating comics with superheroes, but as much as anything it's just poor marketing.)
We've reached a point where bookstores are more important to the long-term success of a book than specialty stores, and indeed where the mass market is not at all a reflection of the specialty-store market. Specialty stores are still necessary (and I happen to like them, quite a lot, I just happen to think most of the people who shop there must have terrible taste based on the books they're buying), but they're becoming less and less so.
What we need are digitally-distributed anthologies - and I don't mean just to the iPad (honestly some Kindle love would be nice but without color it's understandable that they don't want to limit themselves to grayscale).
What we need is a standard format that allows you to save files locally and copy them across devices. For starters.
Some agreement on a reasonable price point would be neat too. ($2 is good; $1 would be better. And yes, anthology pricing, by all means, like the track-or-album model on iTunes.)
And the publishers need to stop focusing on same-day digital releases. It makes comic shops nervous and doesn't help them get any new customers; the people who know comics come out on Wednesdays are already your fucking customers, and the people who just want to read a Batman comic don't know if it came out on Wednesday or Thursday or a goddamn month ago. The only benefit to same-day release is when they pull big marketing pushes like this past week's Fantastic Four to try and pull new people into the comic shop, which incidentally is invariably a big spoilery "fuck you" to the existing fans.