How do you deal with flipping back and forth pages?
For math classes specifically (realistically the only classes that I used a book for), I would frequently flip all around the book, where I was flipping too and from varied per chapter of course. Often times it would be 2 or so locations in the book that had all formula's listed (for the well organized math books!), the n and n-1 chapters text, the page with the current problem set that I was working on, and an answer key in the back of the book.
I guess I could set all of those up as bookmarks, but it'd be a real pain to have to keep adjusting bookmarks every day.
The slow page turn speed is just a killer for e-readers IMHO.
Heck even for large PDFs on tablets I have issues. Right now laptop is about competitive with a paper book (and searching can help a lot, but PDF searching is abysmal in seeming 80% of PDFs), and last time I tried a tablet (about a year ago) they tended to just choke and die on RPG ebooks. (But hey, they are 2x as fast now so maybe things work...)
> When students were given a choice of various media—including hard copy, cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and laptop
How many have actually compared those devices? And what digital format were they using epub, pdf, HTML, txt ?
I have all those devices to try out the same books on. And I'm a student. I would rate them
1) E-reader - least eye strain, good bookmarking, one more device to carry - I only have one without a backlight
2) Tablet - better pdf support, good bookmarking, backlight is handy, multi function can be a boon and a distraction
3) Hard copy - I still read a lot of paper books - too bulky, I bought a sheet feed scanner just to scan my library and dump it
4) Laptop - at least it's not a phone
5) Phone - too small but I have read whole books using it when I had no option