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The other thing to keep in mind is that for many (most?) books, publishers only negotiate for first-publication rights for a single continent. That does not include movie rights, it does not include serialization rights, it does not include e-publication, it doesn't include anything other than the right to publish a dead-tree book version of the work. That's why hard-back and paper-back version of the same book are often put out by different publisers.
Early on, book agents learned how to split all the various potentials for a book so that they negotiate each aspect seperately (and earn their 10% for each negotiation). The music world, however, was ramrodded by the record labels who coerced their young and naive artists (many of whom didn't have any agent to assist in the negotiation of recording contracts) into signing over all their rights to the record label, so the record label didn't need any further negotiation to bring out digital versions of the recordings, and they control all publication rights for many classic rock and jazz and pop songs, so it's a lot easier for them to get to e-distribution.
One can only hope that if people such as the members of this list keep bombarding the publishers with e-mails (most publishers are at least technically savvy enough to have e-mails and web-sites and do their book production digitally these days so it shouldn't be too much longer before they open the floodgates of ebooks) to convince them that there is a legitimate marketplace out here so they will begin to include epublication rights in their negotiations.
So whenever a book you want to read on the Reader isn't available, send an e-mail to both the publisher and the author (if you can find an e-mail address for them -- often this can be gotten from the publisher's web-site) to show them that there is already a marketplace for epublication but that also we're willing to pay and that the marketplace is growing!
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