This is VERY different from how books are experienced.
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
This is all true, if you're using the wrong technology. If you use something like the Sony PRS-600 or 700, then you get all of this and there is no "video screen" to annoy you. It looks like text on paper, and feels like a lightweight portable electronic device. It's very addictive.
Despite being a heavy tech head I will still print out any extended text to dead tree media because it's simply more comfortable and convenient to access in that manner.
Of course you will, because a lot of text is not formatted for an eReader screen size, and the tools to transfer random documents to an eReader are not readily available - with the exception of Calibre, which hopefully soon will include the ability to spider sites and convert that to an ePub or other ebook format.
While I'm about a generation removed at this point, the pilot programs with current university students show the same attachment.
The current generation of readers are mostly 6" and mostly grayscale. The high-end of the next generation (or maybe two generations away) will be color, larger and have a touch screen for highlighting, annotation, etc.
This is moot, however, many textbook publishers just give away their own reader software for notebooks, and sell deeply discounted electronic versions.
