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The main conundrum for ebooks is the same as for all digital content - what was called somewhere the Picard syndrome - right now people do not value digital content as much as physical content, so they are not willing to pay the corresponding prices, so the revenue is not there and it is unlikely that you can expand the pie enough to make up for the ratios involved.
However books as opposed to music/movies/tv are different in the sense that is comparatively hard and time consuming to digitize them at home, while it is trivial to rip a cd, and almost as trivial (assuming you are willing to do it) to rip a dvd. So the publishing industry right now does not face the external pressures music/movie studios face.
Regarding devices, iPods do not sell because of iTunes, iTunes was just the way for Apple to avoid costly ip lawsuits since this way they can tell the studios, look you make 70c per song, we barely profit if so, so ignore that out the thousands of songs people have on their ipods statistically only about 50 come from iTunes...
Any serious ebook reader manufacturer will need a drm store for the same reasons as Apple until drm dissapears, but I do not think they expect to make the real money from there, the Gemstar and Librie failures hopefully disabused anyone from that.
Liviu
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