Not sure if I'm going to get flamed for this, but if all you're doing is taking lecture notes, the Edge probably isn't for you. A spiral notebook, nice pencil, and a flatbed scanner are going to be way cheaper and consume less power (and you may already have access to a scanner). Also, even with a large stylus, the resolution is too coarse for small writing, so you have to write wide-rule-size in order for it to be legible; the available writing surface is also smaller than a notebook page so you're going to have to turn the page a lot more than you're used to.

When I was in high school, the CDs (if provided) were usually already gone when you got the textbook, as they just handed out the same textbooks that were used in the previous year. I don't remember there being PDFs of the entire textbook on those CDs anyway due to copying concerns, there would just be (for example) some extra tests and exercises or visualization software for math books.

In my view at least, the main advantage of the Edge is the ability to make notes directly on documents. If your teachers give out assignments on PDFs, it might be useful for you to be able to do the assignment directly on those documents. If you often have to do research reports where your sources are available directly on the web, you can annotate those web pages just like you can do with PDFs, and that might be useful for you to keep track of your notes for those projects.

So, as much as I'm trying to promote the Edge to the people I know, I don't want to see someone get it and then be unhappy with it. For most people there are better and/or cheaper alternatives.