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I think the question is slanted the wrong way. The term 'e-book reader' leads the thoughts in the wrong direction.

There are different markets for the printed word today. The very short term market is the daily newspaper and the weekly magazine on the one hand, and the printout of the latest version of the report I'm working on on the other. Neither of these will survive more than a few days at the most -- then they'll go into the paper recycling pile. Some of this material is distributed by the web today -- and lifetime of that can be so short that the next minute it's gone, and won't be back. (Lifetime is on the order of weeks)

Slightly longer is the monthly periodical -- some keep National Geographic forever, others perhaps year. Telephone directories belong in this categories, as do the cheapest kind of pocketbooks. Glue-bound material in general belong here: the glue has a life-time which cannot be exceeded. Many corporate documents belong here. (Lifetime is on the order of months and possibly years.)

The very longest life time is with the traditional bound book -- these can last practically forever. (There are books preserved from 800AD, and rarely takes long to find a decent book from the 1500's to buy, as long as you don't care what book it is.) The permanence of books has lead to ... well, 'embellishment' arts and practices, suitable for long-life media, that are entirely wasted on today's newspaper. Noone gives a cheap pocket-book gilt edges, or headbands: they don't last long enough. The term is also overloeaded by a concept of comfort: if a book intended to be read for pleasure is uncomfortable, we have a contradiction.

Now, by calling these devices e-book readers, the province of the books is invaded ... but by association, not because the material to be read belongs to that category. To some extent, I'm sure that their current format influence the apellation: they're in book format for now. And that may bring on the wrong reactions.

I suspect these devices are far more suitable for shorter-term material -- newspapers, printouts, web-data and possibly also some periodicals as well as corporate information. The value is here in the information, not in the medium, and some shortcomings will be accepted because of that. (Another interesting area is that of standards -- this is one area in which specially DRMed media would make sense: say, the POSIX standards on a MMC/SD, or all ISO computer-related standards. I'd like to have the full RFC collection myself, but I hate to have to reformat them to fit the book-sized screen we're stuck to for the moment ...)

The emphasis here is on information and reference, not on books. These devices are really e-readers, not e-book readers. So the question is misleading: why do people want e-book readers? They don't. They may want e-readers -- what they want to use these devices for is not primarily books, but information.

Note: it's pretty obvious, I hope, that gadget nerds are not people in the sense I use the term above.