Anchorhead said:

Something else that seems strange to me is the thought of an electronic device in place of a physical book. I get it for college classrooms, and in fact, I assume it will be how schools function in the next few years. It makes perfect sense. One device in place of an armload of textbooks. Students just get the address of the download site at the start of the school year or semester, and download the books for that course.

It's already starting to get that way. The campus libraries at my university have a stock of Kindles with tons of books pre-loaded onto them that you can check out for a certain amount of time.