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@Harmon: Certainly, as my comment implied, if the backlighting, battery life and weight issues are ever solved on tablets, that makes EBRs totally obsolete. But until/unless they are, EBRs remain an attractive proposition for people that read a lot. Not every person who reads a lot will prefer an EBR to a tablet, but many will. Whether that number is sufficient to sustain a market in EBRs is something that is impossible to predict with certainty, I feel it is, you feel it isn't, we both have no way of "proving" our feelings.
I dont really follow the rest of your argument. It's true that EPUB was "intended" for use by publishers, but it is, in actual fact, used by lots of non-publishers as well, therefore publishers disappearing does not mean that EPUB becomes irrelevant. I, for one, am not going to be content with having all my books hosted as webpages on someone else's servers. The fundamental issue when discussing the obsolescence of ebooks (whatever the format) vs. web publishing is whether there is a significant use case for giving readers total access to a work, rather than the read-only access, that web publishing implies. As such the issue of whether EPUB survives or not is not really the question, more fundamentally, it is whether the *ebook* will survive.
The alternative to the book that you present, web publishing, has significant disadvantages as well as significant advantages compared to the ebook. I doubt very much that either form will ever become extinct. It's like saying that streaming music/video will make all audio and video file formats disappear.
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