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Tell it to supporters of wire recorders, 8tracks, Quadraphonic LPs, or Laservision. (I suspect a lot of googling will be required there.)
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Sadly, I understand all of those references and have hands-on experience with all but the wire recorder, which pre-dates even me!
8-tracks got killed by the smaller, more convenient cassette tapes that had better fidelity. Quadrophonic LPs were killed by the misguided notion that people wanted to be in the middle of the band; the concept was refined with Dolby SurroundSound. LaserDiscs were killed by a smaller, cheaper medium, the DVD. (You left out RCA's VideoDisc "SelectaVision" that used a stylus, wiped out by DiscoVision that used lasers, but I guess you couldn't list
all of the failed tech!)
Adopting any new tech involves the risk that it will become outmoded or simply fail in the marketplace. I'm afraid that epub will fail, at least in the USA, because of the poor implementation: multiple-DRM schemes that destroy the "standard" and complex buying requirements when compared with the ease of buying a Kindle edition from Amazon. Still, I vote with my wallet and buy non-DRMed epubs, cross my fingers and hope the epub crowd gets its act together before Amazon rules the world.
And the publishers: Well, they simply need to be killed and their corpses bulldozed out of the way if they don't get a clue soon.
The tech is the least of my worries regarding ereaders, as it has been for the past five years. The Rocket Reader was more than adequate tech for the times. It was sucky marketing and greed by Goldstar that killed it. No, I don't think it's the tech that's holding ebooks back, but all the rest...the high prices of ebooks, the DRM, the geographic restrictions and the kludgy nature of the buying process (for all but Kindle).