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I recently submitted a grant proposal to give an entire class a set of books pre-loaded onto an ereader (I'm a ninth grade English teacher). Most of the works we read are in the public domain anyway, and we predictably read most of the same works from year to year, so provided that the students take good care of the ereaders, a single good-quality one would be hugely advantageous.
Right now, California English textbooks weigh about eight pounds. Students don't carry them back and forth to school, they don't read them, they don't use them, they are almost entirely worthless -- but because of the Williams Consent Decree, schools are required to distribute one to each student to take home (and the same is true for all core content areas). One of the problems I am expecting to encounter is that a device may not satisfy the Williams law, which would be an interesting problem.
What I really yearn for is the ability to give the students an entire textbook that is easy to carry around, pleasant to use, and helpful. The ideal one will have a dictionary on-board, and text to speech so that the students may listen to works as they read (since a large number have no idea of what the words should sound like -- This is also a well-studied and highly effective scaffold for learning a language).
The current textbook costs $112, before we add district processing (labels and codes of various sorts), but is virtually unusable because of its miserable bulk. New editions of textbooks are "adopted" about every five years. The ereader I would like to get the students costs about $200 delivered, and will be very effective at making literature more accessible. But ... let's face it, it will cost about twice as much and probably last half as long.
This is a great idea that is still in its infancy. But I'm watching closely!
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