Both need to happen—especially in the area of academic book publishing.
Ebooks have the potential to present footnotes, intertextual links, translation glosses, and real-time annotations of professors/classmates. At the moment, the thing that most resembles an academic ebook is a poorly formatted project gutenberg document or a pdf of a photocopied journal.
Almost every ebook store tries to sell public domain material. If they could format and footnote it in a way that added value, it might actually be worth what they want to charge.
Edit:
See, now
this is what I mean. Even with the limitations of epub, this guy still managed to create a text that I would consider using for a class. He even released it for free.