Not sure this is the best plan here: http://io9.com/the-first-college-in-the-u-s-to-open-without-any-books-1626642445
Yeah, I'm not convinced, for two reasons.
One, as gets discussed a little bit there, being able to see what books are shelved together can be helpful (you still needed to know how to search a library catalogue because not everything is shelved together--but that's a similar issue as having to search a digital catalog).
Second, there are plenty of books that don't have e copies out there, for one reason or another. As a (former) historian, I'm slightly aghast at the limitations this is going to put on what students can and can't look into.
Yeah, physical books can be all checked out--but so can digital books. At my public library there are some ebooks that have longer hold lists than their physical counterparts.
I think the ideal really has to be a mixture of the two. If you veer too much to one side, you're going to screw the students up.
http://io9.com/you-can-now-access-all-of-richard-feynmans-physics-lect-1627809095The lectures of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman were legendary. Footage of these lectures does exist, but they are most famously preserved in The Feynman Lectures. The three-volume set may be the most popular collection of physics books ever written, and now you can access it online, in its entirety, for free.
The complete online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics has been made available in HTML 5 through a collaboration between Caltech (where Feyman first delivered these talks, in the early 1960s) and The Feynman Lectures Website. The online edition is "high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures," and, thanks to the implementation of scalable vector graphics, "has been designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape; text, figures and equations can all be zoomed without degradation."
After years of trying to make books available to everyone, now we're in the process of restricting them to those who have the appropriate technology.
It's worse than that. It's making available only those materials which are digitized. It doesn't matter what technology you have available if the source material is restricted in this manner.
caw