Possibly.
I did it with my clamshell...
However, our key was finding the correct edits to Open Firmware to trick into thinking the iBook into thinking it was running an XGA display (it thinks it's a 500MHz white iBook). At the very least, if you could trick a 15" into thinking it was a 17" (1680x1050), and you could find a 15" laptop LCD at that higher resolution, you could do the upgrade that way.
It's not *completely* impossible - the hardest parts are finding the right LCD cable, and trying to get the OS to realize that you're running a higher resolution. Unlike Windows and Linux, OS X makes it virtually impossible to force resolutions within the OS.