iPad users prefer digital texts. Laptop users don't.
a full 94 percent of iPad users and users of other tablet devices either prefer reading digital texts (52 percent) or find them as readable as printed texts (42 percent).
Contrasted with that were laptop users, a large portion of whom--47 percent--said they find reading texts on screen more difficult than reading paper. (The next-largest group among laptop users, 33 percent, said the experience was about equal to reading printed texts.)
The report, "Survey Analysis: Consumer Digital Reading Preferences Reveal the Exaggerated Death of Paper," surveyed more than 1,500 end users in the United States, the UK, Japan, India, Italy, and China in the fourth quarter of 2010. It found that the amount of time spent reading digital texts now nearly equals time spent reading printed materials.
If a school could get as part of a curriculum deal, instead of a book, the e-book along with an e-reader based on iOS or Android OS, it would open an whole new 1-2-1 world. Curriculum publishers would finally have a business driven reason to leverage 1-2-1 pedagogy. They could build their own marketplaces targeted at parents and students interested in supplements to the adopted curriculum. They would have control over the technology to provide confidence in the platform they were investing in.
In Iowa I believe textbook fees could be used to offset the cost of the curriculum bundle.
I haven't heard of any schools that have negotiated these types of deals yet with a publisher, but I'm not really tapped into K12 as much anymore. So perhaps it's already happening. But if not, I'd expect this to be a tipping point event towards 1-2-1 within a 3-5 year horizon.
I know some studies may indicate that students prefer choices when it comes to textbooks, but the question is different if you ask if a student would use an e-book if the e-reader comes along as part of the deal.