Are ebooks the future?

As some one who works on early print culture, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the (possible) pending death of the physical/paper medium. 


On the pro-digital side - you save trees, can get material with the click of a button, and I'd love to move towards electronic student papers that I could mark and annotate with a stylus (really electronic marking as opposed to track changes). 


On the pro-paper side - I love the feel of a book and am very accustomed to the 3-D nature of book/article reading. I often work between several books and an open document at one time - typing on my laptop while reading and underlining in my texts. By far my biggest complaint about the digital is that I can really only look at one thing on a screen at a time. Tabs in browsers help with this, but it's not hte same as being able to put 2, 3, 4 open books next to one another. I find that there is a geography of the printed medium - I connect the development of an argument by where it falls physically in a book or article, and I have a sense of the depth of a work as understood by the literal depth (in the sense of volume) of the book or article. I also love my used books, love sharing books, and get great pleasure from reading through another person's earlier annotations. If you've ever purchased used academic books, or found a well-annotated book at a library - you can often find years of discussions between readers through the annotations they left in the margins. That being said, I think google books has so far the best platform for "reading through" a digital book - perhaps b/c it's just scanned versions of a physical one.


Again pro-digital - how cool would it be to be able to keep all of a classes books on one ereader? no more forgotten texts for class


Again con-digital - the cost. Not that printed books are cheaper, far from it, but they are available easily at libraries, from friends, used, etc.


Knowing I read as much as I do, my family has been asking for years now if I want an ereader. My major response has been consistently no. In their current form, they do not have access to the scholarly material I generally read (except of digitized articles and some digitized books), are way too expensive, the books are too expensive (buy books? with a library nearby? no thanks), and there is no really good annotation/note taking capabilities). There is no real compelling reason for me to switch away from a laptop and whatever books I can get electronically on my computer. I want there to be - I'd love to see a tablet really designed for academic use (ebooks, annotations, note taking, stylus support, .pdf and .doc support - sort of like a macbook pro turned into a tablet with flash memory to reduce the weight) but it's not there.


However, my eye was caught by this: Entourage Edge  one review here.
The Entourage Edge is very interesting. I'd love to play around with one in real life. It definitely sounds like it has its kinks (it is 1st generation after all) but the ability to combine liquid ink for reading and note taking, and a android-powered tablet for reading and internet, is fantastic.


What do you think? Are ebooks are future and are you excited or do you see pending doom? Will ebooks make texts more accessible and democratize access to knowledge? Or will a pay-for-service/product model dominate that will basically make ebooks an ipod or iphone (fun, great tool, but only for those who can afford it).


Oh yeah, and for those following L and I - he has an offer from a recent interview in So Cal. He's using it to leverage against 1 other offer and a second interview he's been trying to set up for a while (the job is "tied up in HR and will post any day...."). So, w/in 2 weeks we'll know where we'll be.