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Want to bet they leave out the audio capabilities for five main reasons?
1. It's cheaper.
2. Much greater battery life for the e-ink display without audio playing. It amounts to continuous, except when buffering, sdhc usage when playing where the sdhc could probably be powered down between chapters or files as most books are organized. This might also help explain greater battery drain with books that are stored as only one large file.
3. DRM - Most music has DRM at point of sale and probably requires licensing on each player and a greater investment on the server side in a marketplace that is probably already dominated and in certain cases proprietary. While a potential source of income, maybe not such a great proposition for other reasons.
4. Audio Book DRM - see above. It may be that previous incarnations were not profitable for music and audio books.
5. There are so many sources of music or noise in most peoples daily lives that adding another seems rather superfluous and probably isn't enough of a wow feature to get people to buy a particular reader. That said, it's not a terrible idea to support audio books if you make tablets since the hardware is already there and probably of decent quality. See number 1.
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