<p>It doesn’t have anything to do with the school. Certain classes are going to have harder-to-find books. The professors pick them. If you take any specialized class, the books may be hard to find. Just because a book is obscure has no bearing on how good it is. Unless you plan to take the most mainstream, popular classes and will never take anything specialized, there will be at least a few times (probably a lot) where your books won’t be in electronic format.</p>
<p>Before even going into the paper vs electronic book debate, why even start with ipad? Not even that the ipad isn’t the only tablet around, but there are true e-readers around.
Now then, you’re going to be wasting a large amount of money if you bought textbooks for the ipad off the ibookstore. Not only are you paying a huge premium for the ipad, but once pay for an e-textbook (at the same cost as a physical textbook, since publishers are greedy as ****), you’re never going to get any of that money back. The great thing about real textbooks is that if you buy them, you can sell them, heavily cutting your losses. Can’t say the same about e-textbooks (especially apple sanctioned fancy pdfs)</p>