The eBook will not take off like iPods did. People love music; nobody reads books. Music is more entertaining, more immediately stimulating, and requires less effort to appreciate. Music is also more versatile (parties, relaxation, focused listening, casual background sounds), faster (one track lasts about three minutes and an album lasts no more than an hour while books take several hours of dedicated reading), and strongly embedded in common culture (books, frankly, are not).
While eBooks may be a hard sell as an entertainment device, they could become standards in business in education. Features such as annotation, highlighting, search, and more powerful organization (basically, the advantages of computers) may allow it to slowly replace books. But it can never have explosive growth as an entertainment device like the iPod.
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