Let's be honest, I bet part of the rationale was that kids would regard the kindle as 'cooler' than old-fashioned, dusty paper books like the ones their parents used...
In terms of information delivery there are significant advantages to electronic methods (search, links, etc) though it's often debatable whether there's a real savings in maintenance (you now get to pay some IT guys to maintain your servers instead of librarians to reshelve the books).
I'd really like to know Ron Hogan got his
7-inch floppies from though, they must be quite the collectors item unlike those useless 8-inch ones
.