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Dedicated readers will not go away, for one good reason: Magazines. Mags will be the next media to go digital (as Barnes & Noble is demonstrating, with great success, with their Nook Color), and devices in the Nook Color and iPad formats are best suited to carry and display them.
Yes, iPad is a general-use device... but that doesn't mean it's the best device to display magazine content, because you can do more with digital magazines than just stare at the pages. We can expect digital magazine content to evolve with digital access, to include: Libraries; content-sourcing and indexing; cut-and-paste and "scrapbook" functions; and probably a dozen other functions I haven't thought of, or aren't coming to me right now. Maybe a general-use device can handle these functions, but a dedicated device will handle them more efficiently.
As to format, I agree that Jeter might be thinking too American here: ePub has already become the dominant format for most of the world; most bookstores that sold other formats have already added or switched to ePub; ePub is just plain better than Mobi; and not everyone in the world buys ebooks from Amazon. (EPub is also better-suited for digital magazines than Mobi, though PDF is better still... a good reason not to discount the future of PDF in reading.) Even in the places that do, devices would be better suited being able to read Mobi AND ePub than just one format.
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