Can e-readers replace textbooks?

In reading the article "Start Your Back-to-School Shopping With These Tools" from Ed Tech, the one item that stood out for me was using the Kindle Fire as a way to start replacing books in schools. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially in my current teaching situation in an international school in China. Since our language of instruction is English, all textbooks must be ordered from outside of China. I won't go into all of the gory details, but this is an extreme hassle, as I've found out since becoming the mathematics chair and being responsible for ordering all educational materials for the department.

The pilot program described in this article, also from Ed Tech, was to use funds budgeted for textbooks to purchase 100 Kindle Fire tablets for student use. E-books are much less expensive, and some publishers allow deployment of e-books to five Kindles, while others have no limitations. So for my school, we could save a ton of money on shipping costs alone, to say nothing of the import duties and screening of our educational materials by the PRC government. My wife, who teaches music, goes through all kinds of hassles since only "approved" music can be imported into China. Plus, all of our educational resources must be purchased through a special government agent. So even if we had to pay the same price for an e-book as we currently pay for the paper textbook, we still save a lot of money, time, and frustration. I'm not sure what direction educational publishers are going with making more of their material available as e-books, but I think it is something that cannot be ignored.

This is something that I will be suggesting to our administration for future exploration. The books for all of my classes are on CD, so I have been in a paperless textbook environment for the past seven years. The kids have no problems with it, and in fact most of them prefer reading their books on their device of choice rather than using a "regular" book. For the upcoming school year, our math department will only be issuing hard copy textbooks to those students who request one. I believe this will be the way of the future, and the traditional textbook will become a vanishing commodity.