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Why would someone want to intentionally read a book length text or even journal article length text on a mini-screen like the iPhone or iPod touch? That's rather ridiculous and makes reading very limited. Such a tiny screen is no conducive to skimming and scanning. When I read academic texts (my field is anthropology) much of the time I skim through things and read portions that I deem necessary. The iPhone is a bad device for something like this. By the way, I own the iPod touch and I never use it to do lengthy reading.
Also, I'm not sure that to call eBook reading a new phenomenon a useful classification. We've been reading a lot of lengthy texts on the laptop screen for a while now. They may not be in the format of a book, but they certainly are lengthy. Examples include documents, internet websites, online journals, and so forth. With regards to reading lengthy texts, we've been doing that for a long time now (long in computer years). What is a little different is having digital reader devices. So, it's not the reading that that's new but rather what device the reading is done on.
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