The number of people who read books may be too small for Jobs to be interested in making a dedicated eBook reader, but I doubt he'd turn up his nose at a chance to make money on eBooks using existing hardware. I would not be at all surprised if the iTunes store ends up selling ebooks for the iPod Touch, etc. The interesting question is whether the books would be the same as those currently available, or whether Jobs might go for books marketed toward younger readers, which is a segment currently being largely ignored by publishers and ebook vendors. If he could get the "Harry Potter" marketing segment (and especially if he could convince Rowling to release the HP books as legal ebooks for his platform), he could conceivably sell a
lot of books, with very minimal investment.
I know not only kids use iPods, but I'm just observing that a lot of kids
do have iPods, whereas they don't usually have other portable reading platforms (e.g. PDAs). Apple has also been cozy with schools in the past. If they put a pile of literature aimed at kids into iTunes, especially the stuff schools are assigning or encouraging kids to read, and then offered some kind of school-based discount on the books, I think they could see a lot of benefits, both financial and PR.
Of course, the books would probably be locked into yet another new proprietary format.
