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You are, of course, correct, Tausin, and this has been possible for years on pcs. For some reason, however, despite the prevalence of laptops in classes, it has never overridden the use of paper texts either for lecturer nor students. In written works, structures/sentences/phrases are often very similar making a global search at times difficult and, at times, more time consuming, especially if required to type the sentence searched for in by hand (from memory without error) in order to find it--it is not always a simple word search and is dependent on the field.
The author was referring to a course where students had ALL of the different mediums--hard back, paper back, photo copy and ereaders. That is real-world use. It is still utopic to believe that all students will have the same device. The search function is exclusive to the minority in the class (a few readers)-therefore a professor uses the accepted technique for lecturing.
Lecturing technique is not going to change any time soon. It is still most practical to teach with the most "general" or simple search function which remains page numbers (with the caveat that in a paper/syllabus with outline sections that is also used). That is a simple and basic fact and has nothing to do with intelligence or ability--but the media used.
I find it interesting that this was one of the first shortcomings mentioned that I read on Mobilread--I believe it was for general book clubs where the ereaders caused problems with finding the exact page being discussed--you can search for it, I do not have the link at hand (I am sorry). I believe that was also mentioned that e-books also said "from page 18-25" or something similar on some readers to account for edition derriviations? hmmm) that also caused some to mention it was easier to just by the pb so that everyone had the same format.
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