Ok, I just had the awesomest idea and had to share although it probably means very little for most of you.

Academic book publishers are always sending out free books to professors, some at the professor's request and some just randomly. There's a lot of gripe on the publishers' part about professors reselling those books that they don't keep/use. And of course, there's the eternal problem of books being updated every other year.

What if the books publishers had their books available on a Kindle type of machine. Heck, each publisher could develop their own proprietary machine. Then they could send professors the machine and load the books onto to. No resell, no shipping costs, no printing costs. When new books come out, they could add them to the prof's account. Now of course they'd want to safeguard their little machines so it isn't like giving out free Kindles to profs who will use them as Kindles and not academic textbook reviewing machines, but I'm sure there's a way to lock the machine to purchases or downloads or accounts that aren't created by the publisher for the individual.

I would be so much more interested in browsing through textbooks on a cool little machine than lugging them all home or sitting in my hot (hot hot hot hot) office trying to determine which one I prefer.