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The promise was the PC was going to replace all paper at its advent. Look at printer and copier sales and tell me if that has happened yet. We will always have some form of non-electronic media for the written word. Fiction will be the first to go away from paperbacks, followed eventually by non-fiction once schools demand electronic versions. Universities will be first followed by private and then public schools. Students can't haul all those books around anymore, so the prevailing impetus will be toward the electronic medium.
Costs on multi-use devices will drop to commodity prices, making the device more like the calculators students use today. A $139 Kindle is cheaper than Texas Instruments latest iteration of their calculator. My school was supposed to be "bookless" when it was built over a decade ago, but the publishers wouldn't support it. Another problem with public school adoption is the WiFi and 4G built into these devices. Right now, school districts strictly control Internet access, so this will become a major issue in adopting these devices. Ten years seems more realistic than five.
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