I remember when the university where I worked made a big show out of moving to online textbooks. It was supposed to reduce the cost, reduce the need to lug books around, save trees, any rationale you could think of was thrown into the mix.

In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money.

In fact printed books are still widely used.