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I think that's one of the hardest things for print designers to get used to. Website-wise, I'm one of the oddballs: I came from programming, not design, so I didn't have to have to unlearn those bad habits (I had a whole different set of bad habits). Print designers are used to putting something on a page and having it stay there and behave itself. It's a fixed medium. Magazine pages or manual covers don't suddenly get up and rearrange themselves when you're not looking. For a website -- or an ebook -- however, you don't have much control over how that page is going to be viewed, or even what it's going to be viewed on. It might be on a tiny display on a smartphone, or on a wall-sized Jumbotron. It might be in squint-o-vision type, or big enough to be read by a person with cataracts. And, of course, it might be anything in between.
The trick isn't to try to force flexible design to act like print; that's as ridiculous as trying to make a magazine page resize itself (though it is more possible, of course). Some people put up giant image-mapped graphics as "web pages" and expect other people to use them; that gets their competitors a lot of business, naturally. The trick is to understand what it is that the user wants to do with it, and make that as easy as possible for said user. That way they think you're a clueful designer instead of an arrogant snob.
Imagine, say, a coffee-table book of photos of great cities of the world. It's beautifully laid out, with each picture nicely framed on its page, perhaps with a discreet caption telling where it was taken and when. "The Arc de Triomphe, Paris, in the late spring" for instance. The whole design works beautifully together, and the book is visually striking. But what does the user want? Well, show someone two books. One is our original here, except with the pictures replaced by shaky travel snapshots of the scenes. The other has the right pictures, but the layout is plebeian and you really want to hurt the designer of the font used for the captions. Almost without exception, people would choose the latter as the better of the two books. They're after the content, and making it pretty isn't even icing on the cake; it's decorations on the icing.
So when it comes to designing something to be read on an e-reader, good functional design is far more important than decorative design. You don't know what someone will be reading that book on. Perhaps equally important, you don't know what someone will be reading that book on next year. One of the reasons that pbooks have held up so well for centuries is that they're still functional and still usable. Or, more correctly, some of them are. Reading a book in a heavy blackletter font is very difficult for the average person; you can laugh at TNR, but it's clear and readable. People don't generally not read the Gutenberg Bible because it isn't inadequately beautiful (they're gorgeous) but because it's inadequately readable.
I am not kidding, not even in the slightest, about my recommended reading. Read The Design of Everyday Things and Don't Make Me Think! if you read nothing else from my list. They won't teach you to use your software; they'll teach you what to do with it. Frankly, I think anyone who wants to design anything, whether it's an ebook or a skyscraper or a door handle, should read The Design of Everyday Things. It's one of those "oh, now I understand" books. I can't hype it enough for anyone dealing with any type of user interface (and an ebook or a website is a user interface, something else that people don't seem to get).
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