[NatCh]

Fourth:

4. Long live batteries. The technical difficulty that came up the most in my interviews with students was battery life. Students said they sometimes forgot to charge their laptops overnight, so they had to find a spot in the lecture hall to plug in if they wanted to use their books in class. Other students said they had several classes in a row and inevitably ran out of juice. "It's harder to take your computer everywhere than a book, I think, because you have to carry the power cord and all," said Sara Herrera, a freshman whose laptop's battery typically lasts only about an hour and a half.

Sure, printed books are heavy, but when was the last time one went blank for lack of power?

Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle boast longer battery lives than laptops, so longevity is an advantage of those gadgets.