[NatCh]

Second:

2. Learning curves ahead. Tania Brobst, a junior at the university, is proud of the note-taking techniques she's developed over the years. She crafts typed study guides for each of her courses, and she carefully highlights material in her printed textbooks.

When she ended up in a marketing course this spring that required her to use a digital textbook, she had to adapt her strategies. "It took some experimenting on my part," she said. "I mean, you can easily read it, but if you want to highlight or enlarge the text or share your notes with other people," you have to learn to do that. Initially skeptical, she now says she prefers the electronic version in part because of its search feature and the ability to paste passages into a Microsoft Word document.

Other students reported an adjustment period as well. "I didn't realize how many applications there were on the e-textbook," wrote one student in the university's survey. "The more I have used it, the more I have discovered what I can do with it."

As Darren Finney, a freshman, told me in the student union: "They should have a week in class where they explain how to use it."