Etextbooks are a great idea in theory. I write software manuals for a living (wait, I'm going somewhere with this!) and the manuals are ruddy huge things that are released in electronic format only. As far as I know, they're rarely printed out in full. Usually I'd expect information-uptake issues, but it seems that careful, hyperlinked indexing and cross-referencing makes online reading easier than paper-reading in texts which people are going to be reading in small chunks or looking up particular bits of information.
As far as ebook readers go... I guess the big necessities I can see are support for hyperlinks and a 'back' button to take you to the paragraph you just left.
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