Well, keep dreaming, because that's not the pitch. E-books will cost you almost the full freight of a physical book. And, because you can't do much with it except read it, an e-book has no advantage. The pitch appears to be that you can hold 4,000 pages on a Rocket eBook, making it lighter than the 13 or 14 books that might contain 4,000 pages. I know why books haven't, except in the most limited cases, made the great leap forward into the digital universe.
Publishers are in the business of publishing books.
They think in units. A similar bias caused them to embrace CD-ROMs. My publisher, for instance, believes that the economics of e-books should be the same as those of printed books. A bookstore buys a printed book from a publisher for approximately 50 percent of its cover price. In fact, my publisher says, and perhaps even believes, that its cost is not significantly different from a printed book.