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So as a grad student, I suppose I have a bit of an inside perspective on this. The first is that ebook support needs to get much better than it is now. Highlighting, note-taking, page numbers, fast navigation, etc. all need to be improved. Navigation is more than just page numbers. If I'm reading "and so using equation 3.14 we can find ... (eq 7.69)", I need to be able to flip back to equation 3.14 quickly. It's amazing how quickly you can thumb through pages in a physical book, as compared to an ereader.
Secondly, none of the formats out there support equations well, which leaves those of us in the sciences and mathematics out in the cold when it comes to etextbooks. I kind of find this surprising because by the time you throw in a calculus textbook, an intro physics textbook, and maybe a chemistry book for good measure, you're lugging around maybe 30+ pounds of weight. I'd think that science majors would be the first to flock to etextbooks to save our poor backs!!!
Finally, you'd need to support having additional books and papers open. I come up against this all the time in my research and working graduate level problem sets. I'm working through adapting a derivation in a paper on such-and-such for my own research, and they use an equation from diffusion theory that I'm not familiar with. Now I want to have that book open and flip back and forth between it and the paper. Oh, and my particles are charged, so I need my electromagnetism book open so I can see how to adapt the equations for a conserved charge...pretty soon the navigation to open a book, go back to this book, go to the paper becomes a pain.
And then of course there's the issue of greedy publishers. My graduate level textbooks becomes references I'll use for the next thirty years or so- there's no way I'm getting an ebook that expires in 6 months!
So, at least without these things fixed, I don't see etextbooks taking off. And I don't see today's academic publishers fixing them. I'd like to see them take off. I do find having e-textbooks (scanned from paper books that I've purchased) to be useful- because I can't have two copies of every books- one at home and one in my office- and the book I need is always in the wrong place. And it's useful when I'm sitting down to read through a section or paper that I don't need too much else for. But quite often I still find myself returning to the paper books.
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