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I don't believe the comparison with iPods is valid anyway. Vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs have always required additional hardware in order to play back the recording so needing an iPod for MP3s was seen as acceptable. It has always been necessary to spend money on this hardware. With paper books, however, you buy the reading hardware with the content and you get get new hardware every time you buy a paper book. For ebooks the hardware is an additional cost that wasn't required before and much higher than it is for the paper book. Anybody who only reads occasionally is going to balk at spending £200+ on an ebook reader. You need to either read a lot or have a need to carry several books at once before it becomes attractive or, what I think is the real barrier, the price has to come down.
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