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You're right, I also expect publishers to figure out how to profit from e-books soon. And your analogy to movies and TV is apropos, because I expect the solution to e-book profitability will be the same thing that made TV profitable, namely, advertisements.
The interesting thing about how well TV ads worked, was that the shows never had a direct link to the products they sold... an advertiser attached their ads to a show, hoping to sell a lot of soap, but without much (or any) direct proof that their soap buyers were buying because they'd seen the ad on that particular show. In other words, the advertiser was really only paying for the priviledge of getting their ad to be seen by the most people, whether the product sold or not. But this nebulous system seemed to be good enough for TV, and it became a standard system.
With e-books, the same strategy could be taken. If the method is good enough for TV, it should be good enough for e-books. All it will take for advertisers to sign on is the guarantee that their ads will be seen by a significant number of the people they want to sell to, which will probably be technophiles, e-book readers, and those who obviously show an interest in whatever subject is featured in the e-book or e-mag they bought.
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