must be gettin old. I'm starting to say the same thing my parents did. "Why on heavens does it cost so much I remember..." I thought my engineering text book was really expensive at ahem $25.00!! then again gas was about 50 cents a gallon. Okay that was some years ago. I do look at the cost of engineering text books and do see $180 to well over $200. Ouie!!

I tried a android powered tablet with touch screen. I HATE IT!! It's not so much with readability, or that it does not use e-paper or lack of keyboard and a mouse to navigate easily, its all the other things. Without warning it decides to reformat and take you dozens of pages away and you are not sure where you were... to try to enlarge the image and again takes you several pages away. Sometimes, the figure they are referring is several pages away and you can't follow what it says because you are constantly going back and forth then it dumps you out...

I prefer a hard copy! Do have number of books in pdf format for me to read on the tablet as well as on my netbook and on my desktop PC. Desktop PC is acceptable because I can open the same file twice so if I have to go back and forth, I can get to the figures or tables on one window and read the text on the other window. No bouncing back and forth.

Netbook screen is too small for lot of textbook. Again I'm going back and forth on the screen.

Tablet, maybe its my cheap $70.00 tablet. I'm not happy with it. Also being somewhat older, I have progressive lens. fonts on the tablet are too hard for me to read so I enlarge it then I can only read maybe two or three paragraph at a time if its reasonably sized.

e-ink screen was really easy on the eyes. Newer generations are always improving the contrast so its like reading a glossy book. power consumption is lot lower so you really don't have to worry about running out of battery power as long as you recharge it every day or two sometimes three days.

Maybe find out what your daughter prefers.