One could and should argue that reading and learning from webpages is an e-book. All the stuff you mentioned about skipping around, footnotes, following referen

One could and should argue that reading and learning from webpages is an e-book. All the stuff you mentioned about skipping around, footnotes, following references, are all things that were solved with HTML. It's just that the current state of 'ebooks' have regressed and using their own formats. So if they learn and read from websites then they are learning from ebooks. I think they would prefer to have the internet than to have paper books.