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I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
I'm a history professor here in Canada. I've been using ereader options (mostly PDF and html files of articles and historical sources that students can read/print in whatever format's most appealing) in courses for a while but it's slow going.
Some students don't like the ereaders whether physical or virtual on their laptops). Some books (especially textbooks in the sciences) don't translate well for ereaders, at least not yet. There's a serious format shift going from the large-scale textbook to the small-scale ereader version that will require a lot of changes beginning with authors and editors. And that's assuming that the electronic version's even available here in Canada!
As it stands, it takes a lot of work to put together an electronic reader or textbook, even an anthology of pre-existing sources that you're paying authors for their work. It's stagger, the sheer hassle of getting permissions to republish in the new formats (a surprisingly costly, time-consuming and headache-inducing endeavour for the prof and the staff). We can spend months unsuccessfully trying to acquire rights to put a piece into a one-time use classroom anthology!
Keep an eye out for the implications of bill C-32, here in Canada. Some publishers and some lobby groups (like the inaptly named "Access Copyright") want to squelch the fair use principle for educators. Those that are based in the states also don't have much of a priority for answering requests from individual Canadian universities and schools to e-anthologize an article, chapter or other source, at any price. Some are better than others but are very much tied to a browser-based solution, as with CourseSmart.
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