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It'll be a while before ebooks are useful in an academic setting as more than an adjunct to traditional books. Right now, none of the ebook readers allow the habits that work best for study.
You can't open three books at once and flip between them. Annotations are limited, nonexistent in some readers and some filetypes. The tiny screens are not good for anything with pictures. Ebook purchasing & loaning is still troublesome--a school can't buy multiple copies of an ebook to loan out to students. Bookmarking within ebooks is limited, and there's no way to match the usefulness of multiple colored flags on multiple books.
Ebook readers, right now, are great for linear reading. They're *excellent* for "start this book at page 1, and keep going until you're finished." They're mediocre for poetry (the formatting limitations come into play), and awful for research that involves switching back and forth between pages, chapters or books.
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