Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.cmu.edu/) is conducting (http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/education/s_332353.html) an experiment at The Ellis School (http://www.theellisschool.org/) and one of CMU's own classes in which traditional textbooks are replaced with HP 1100 Tablet PCs (http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/tabletpc/tc1100/) (starting price: $1,599). The university received a $100k grant from HP to study how well students can learn with e-texts. So far responses have been good:

"I can understand the material better because I have a visual image. It's a lot easier and faster to type. It's all on one file," said Chao, 14, of Squirrel Hill...Ellis students complain of long startup times for the PC and the danger of computer crashes, but the benefits, they say, outweigh the disadvantages.Before this experiment, Chao said her 6-year-old brother Bobby could not even lift her bookbag, which often contained four textbooks and three binders. The bookbag of her classmate Heather Acuff, 14, of McCandless, was so heavy that she used to roll it around on wheels...Besides its lightness, Gunawardena said, another popular feature is the search engine, which works like Google. Students type in some key words, and the search engine finds a particular passage faster than they could from the index of a hardback.
Google could also lead into temptation, right? What's your next excuse when you fail to deliver your paper on time? "Sorry Professor Saltzberg, but I couldn't study the text sources because Google was down yesterday."

Carnegie Mellon University is conducting an experiment at The Ellis School and one of CMU's own classes in which traditional textbooks are replaced with HP 1100 Tablet PCs (starting price: $1,599).This reminds me of how Microsoft was trying to "encourage underpriviledged education" by giving hundreds of computers to villages in Africa, but their contract specifically denied any non-Microsoft products from running on those machines. Curious that you're trying to educate people, but only letting them learn one way of doing things... the Microsoft way. "...the first crack rock is free, and its all you'll need."
Seriously though, there's a major problem with replacing "books" with tablets (and Star Trek got it right here with their PADD devices): Books are read up and down, left to right (left page, right page, flip, left page, right page, etc.) Most of the "ebook" material I've seen represented on tablet devices is always one long monolithic "webpage" format. That's very hard to read and compare page to page.

If it isn't side-by-side (and studies have shown this is the best way to read, comprehend and retain information), then it will get lost, and we'll end up breeding children with huge ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) problems, who are just "skimming" the material because they can go back later and Google it. Why remember something you can just recall on your cellphone in seconds?

This is a HUGE problem.

Google could also lead into temptation, right? What's your next excuse when you fail to deliver your paper on time? "Sorry Professor Saltzberg, but I couldn't study the text sources because Google was down yesterday."Plagarism is a huge, growing problem. There are developers out there writing software to find people who directly plagarize articles, stories, research. With the proliferation of blogs, its even harder to verify a first-level resource for research. How do you know something is "true" if 10 people all say the same thing (and 9 of them copied from one of the others)?
"Stealing the work of one is 'plagarism'. Stealing the work of many is 'research'"