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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
There isn't one yet. Some of that is tech/physical limitations--e-ink is fairly new, and getting it fast enough to do the rapid changes that academic use requires is just now becoming possible. (Even without flipping pages, jumping back and forth between pages and TOC and other books needs good processor speeds.)
Most ebook software is designed with the notion that the books are your permanent library of leisure reading material. There's no good support for changing categories on the fly or connecting books to each other, and navigation inside a book is often limited to whatever the publisher arranged as for the TOC. There is no "skip to next page with a picture/chart." There is no "tag chapter 7 in that other book with a link to this one." There is no "sort by publisher/journal name/university source."
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Most of this is simple to implement. While it will still be limited to what metadata the publishers put in, because you'd need something highly complex (more so than what is currently possible) to sort through the data and generate the proper tables automatically. Certain things for parsing though would be very easy to do, such as jumping to the next page that has a chart. Linking between books would still be difficult, due to the possibility that they may not have that other book. As it stands though, very few books (paper or otherwise) are sold dependent of others. And the sorting method you mention can also be done (ebooks currently have things setup for including metadata for sources, publishers, etc). The biggest thing is simply getting the publishers to come to some sort of standard, like the fiction industry has mostly done. For fiction, you have basically two major formats, that are really similar in most aspects (even construction). On text books, you can't even get the publishers to agree on if they want the ebooks accessable via a file or via a webpage, let alone the structure of a file format.