Well yes and no. There are several book user types (old/young, technical/leisure,...) as well as several book categories (free - public domain / copyrighted, entertainment/technical/....)
For instance, there is a lot of free public domain content (see
Google books ) that can be used now without any limits on any device. I would imagine that students can find a lot of useful material right there. There are all sorts of technical manuals that are also free.
Even the worst DRM scheme may be suitable for books that are read once and simply discarded; leisure type stuff. You may not be able to pass it on to a friend like printed, but if it is cheap enough friend can buy his own.
I think that both of these will persist and exist for a long time, free unencumbered PDFs and TXTs as well as a plethora of DRMs. Of course, most of the books fall into the gray zone between these extremes. They are not free and probably have some sort of DRM, but not cheap and you'd like some privileges (keep it for a long time, pass/borrow to a friend, etc.) Hence the battle will rage for many years in this grey zone.
The obvious fatality will be these, first e-reader devices. They are doomed just like the first palm device, Apple Newton. Wonderful design, excellent features, but expensive. In this case the price is high relative to the lack of content, of course. From their ashes will rise simpler cheaper designs and only after they flood the market will there be significant pressure on publishers and they'll start trying to resolve the mess seriously. In summary, yes it will take a long time to achieve simple ubiquotous e-book availability, but no we don't have to wait as there are already many public domain e-books.