I think the publishers are the biggest impediment to eBooks. They’re worried that their business model is going to end up like the music industry, with rampant piracy and dropping prices as content goes digital. So they’re reluctant to sign deals to make their books available electronically.

As far as textbooks go, I personally like to have something I can put my hand on. But a supplementary electronic copy would be fantastic; I’d pay $20 or so more for a hardcopy/eBook bundle, but a $150 electronic-only would be a tough sell.

The ability to mark up textbooks with notes on a touchscreen would be a killer app for education, I think… you could even imagine working out homework problems and submitting them electronically all on your reader device.

Right now, E-ink sell monochrome displays with switching times on the order of half a second or so. But, they have prototype full color displays and I believe the “in the lab” switching times are getting down into the 50ms range — early LCDs were around 30ms or higher.

Pretty nice, considering that the display is reflective and nonvolatile, so it only consumes power when switching. An ultraportable laptop (or tablet…) with 10-20+ hrs of battery life would be nice.

Saw a working prototype of a full-color e-reader that was maybe 1cm thick – I think I’ll wait for that to hit the streets instead of being a Kindle early adopter. Plus, for $400 I can have an iPhone instead.