Well, "my academic documents" don't need colour, even the text books are in b&w, some with additional red ink to mark important paragraphs/equations.
Colour e-ink will be the next logical step; but when this will be buyable is another question.
A know problem is that the PR-guys are much too optimistic. They try to sell products which will exit in near future. Sometimes "near" are years.
Back to to this pdf/Adobe DE thing:
the format in natural science academic world is pdf because it is a natural output of LaTeX. If you wanna be cute to your reader you will publish the source tex file, too. Then the reader can reflow content/generate a pdf with wanted dimension.