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I have to agree with what some others are saying...ebooks are too fragmented a medium with inferior hardware backing and no real trust behind them on the part of the publishers.
ebook reading technology is not THAT new, and e-ink display technology is also not that new. I really think that there's a reluctance about developing electronic readers, and book publishers can benefit extensively from making ebooks encumbering and unwieldy.
You need a really good annotation/writing pad system (more advanced and readable than most chicken-scratches touch screens do), highlighting, a means of quick cross-referencing, rapid page flipping, and decent viewing quality, most likely in color for many texts with diagrams. The sluggish, mediocre-quality ebooks of today just aren't geared for that kind of use. Computer screen reading is generally painful enough without having to transfer all my textbooks to it.
Further, there's a bit of a cognitive division between being in a book and being on a computer. The multitasking nature of computing means that when reading a book on the screen, significant effort is needed to retain attention on the book, and a slip of concentration leads to email checking, chatting on IM, dinking around on Wikipedia, and a quick jump to failblog or some other entertainment. Woops, spent 2 hours on youtube chasing links! A physical textbook is a dedicated environment all its own, and once you're in it, it's much harder to wander away. Ebook devices can almost accomplish the same thing, though they're just not good enough to do so effectively with dense texts.
Really, I can see the potential for academic use, but today in practical terms, a Kindle DX or iRex Reader or a Sony reader are pretty lame devices, and the publishing companies are all too happy to castrate their digital offerings in a feigned attempt to "embrace technology" while utterly discouraging its use.
Beyond reading novels that I can't afford to waste apartment space storing (anything I find to be a really good read, I will have a paper copy of simply for typography, which e-readers are again wholly inferior at), I can't imagine my Sony reader being used for anything remotely productive in the way of research or study.
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