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I'm a bit surprised to discover from some of the comments that habit has already taken over with these relatively new devices called e-books. Obviously, the Maryland prototype addresses a real problem that those of us who use either or both computers and e-books for reading and research purposes have discovered. If you are doing research, you end up doing a great deal of cross-referencing and parallel reading that, in the paper/print world means having a large number of open books, sheets of paper, etc. spread all over the desk. Novel readers are more like tv viewers in that they are focused on one source at a time. But students and their teachers don't necessarily read that way. My Sony Reader has been especially useful for me as a repository for lots of journal articles and whole scholarly books (not necessarily reference books) that I can render portable and consult as a group. So I download a large number of articles on one topic that I can read as a collection; the Reader allows me to make up an anthology or ensemble of articles on one particular topic and take the whole group with me. But the ability to mark up, link from one text to another (especially when one refers to another in a footnote), or simply juxtapose two differing interpretations--these are capabilities that would really make the e-book take off in schools and academic, legal, and even business environments.
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