Cory Doctorow is chairing a session at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference titled, "eBooks: neither e- nor books. Discuss," covering the "broken metaphor" of ebooks and epublishing.
As someone whose PDA use is limited exclusively to reading downloaded books (though even that I haven't done lately), I can attest to the existence now of ebook reading on the fringes. I've never had an ebook device or bought an "Ebook™," but Project Gutenberg et al. kept my Palm V happy quite a while.
