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Originally Posted by cromag
She just graduated from college and will be continuing on for her PhD. Ebooks are uniformly cheaper than paper books (she doesn't read BPH best-sellers). They are also more portable as she moves from dorm to apartment (and, probably, to the next apartment, etc.) Things like that.
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eBooks certainly have the virtue of portability, and ease of storage. I comment that one nice thing abut eBooks is that you don't call the paramedics if my To Be Read stack topples over on me. (The TBR stack in print editions is largely hardcover, and those might cause injury...)
Pricing may not be better. An old friend I had a conversation with last week talked about buying used PB editions because they were cheaper than the eBook versions. She blamed the big publishers and Amazon. I had to explain that 80-90% of the cost of publishing a book was incurred before it ever reached the point of publication in either format, and the big trade houses
couldn't price at the level she'd prefer. (The print/bind/warehouse/distribute costs for print editions are perhaps
10% of the average book's budget, and dropping them entirely wouldn't provide anywhere near the cost savings eBook advocates seem to think they would.)
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She ran into this problem last year, when she was went to Shanghai for a semester abroad and a summer research internship. Weight restrictions meant she was very limited in what she could bring with her, and back.
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Part of the problem there is that textbooks and technical books are in PDF if they are in electronic format at all, with the aforementioned issues of display on the eBook viewer device.
The Kindle DX was the first Kindle model with the ability to view PDF files, using Adobe's Mobile SDK, and had a larger than normal screen to make PDF viewing easier. It got a tepid reception. Among other problems, students found it problematic to communicate and share information using them. And there's a healthy resale market for used textbooks that goes away when electronic versions are used, which was another source of resistance.
You don't get to choose the textbook you use - it's assigned by your professor (who may have been an author), and textbook publishers concentrate sales efforts on getting their texts to be the assigned works students must buy. If you are a student, and can buy an already highlighted and annotated copy of the book from a student who previously took the course, you pay less, the other student recovers part of their purchase price, and both are happy. If it's a PDF, that can't happen.
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But she's pretty bright. I'm sure she'll see it my way, eventually. 
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She may well.
I'm delighted with eBook editions for straight forward linear narratives like fiction. For other things, the equation may change. I mentioned things in my prior message that just don't work as eBooks for me , and the sort of things your daughter had to read for school would probably join them.
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Dennis