You are clearly not paying attention. To the best of my knowledge, you cannot buy textbooks on the iPad the same way that you can buy novels. A purchase implies permanent ownership. The fee that you pay for a textbook entitles you to use it for a limited amount of time after which it is no longer available to you. Mr. Incredible, this is called rent.
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More on Apple's Textbook Plans for Thursday's Media Event
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Minus the fact that print is a minor cost of the books. Most of the money is in other parts. The text book industry like the electronic books taking off because it helps kills the used textbook market. They already do crap updates to books very fast just so a new edition comes out. Crap often times being just reordering the problems in it. Means every student needs to get a new book instead of a used.
My experiences leads to the exact opposite conclusion. Textbook publishers hate the idea of ebooks. Printing on dead trees represents a huge capital investment and a barrier to entry of competition. The number of textbook publishers is in significant decline. Check the number of unique publishers of textbooks in your field.
There is also the issue to storage and transportation. With ebooks, storage is on a server somewhere. Transportation is via the Internet. No boxes, loading docks, fork lifts, ... any of that stuff.
As such, there barriers to entry are dramatically lowered if we switch from dead trees to ebooks. Small houses can compete with the conglomerate publishers. Your professors may decide that they can do better jobs than the favorite author of the conglomerate publishing house.
We'll have to see what Apple has to offer in about 30 minutes. I have hopes that this is the start of a new day.