Sounds like a good idea to me, but iPhone wins out for now.
Most of the respondents to this article failed to recognize one of the primary points you made, which is the reduced eye strain. That alone makes the e-reader option worth looking at(pun fully intended). Add to that the increased screen size vs. a PDA, and correct page orientation vs. a netbook/notebook, I think it's a win. My only negative comment is in regards to point 8. You said "purchase an e-book and make it available for all of your e-reader-ready employees." But you still have to purchase a separate copy for each e-reader, or some mechanism needs to be put in place to "check out" the book from your electronic library, and purchase enough copies to handle the number of simultaneous readers you expect to have. I don't believe those mechanisms are in place yet.
Another positive I can think of though, is easy deployment of a corporate book-of-the-month club. Many good companies have or at least should have a monthly recommended book, that helps the employees become more goal oriented and think about ways to enhance their own, and the company's performance. A company that does that would make up the price of the e-reader in a few months with the savings on the e-books.
That said, I think the iPhone wins for now, because it's easy to add an e-book reader app to it, and of course it functions as a phone, and you can deploy other corporate applications to it. It doesn't solve the eye strain problem, but it has too many other advantages.
What I would like to see is an e-book reader with full PDA capability. Other PDA apps would benefit from the increased screen size and reduced eye strain. However, I think e-ink technology isn't quite there yet. It seems the e-readers are stuck printing a full page at a time, and are still somewhat slow at that. They don't yet have the ability to update just a portion of the screen, which prevents them from being able to handle more general purpose applications.
