The Texas Board of Education is planning a pilot program to distribute electronic books and laptop computers next fall to thousands of high school students to replace textbooks. Other educators around the nation are planning similar changes.

Experts say that while there are two electronic book devices on the market and an exponential increase in reference and scholarly material available on line, it is doubtful such devices will altogether replace traditional books -- just as television did not doom radio.

But several developments are assisting the trend.

• Electronic book technology is advancing -- with better screen resolution and longer battery life -- while costs are dropping.

• The amount of material available for downloading from the Internet is now enormous -- and incalculably lighter in weight than the paper-printed equivalents.

• A generation is coming of age for whom absorbing digital information seems easy and natural.

• Material from the Internet can be updated with greater ease and at lower cost than printed texts.

The market for educational texts was more than $5.5 billion last year, and has grown more than 8 percent so far this year.

In Japan, a company is reportedly developing a kind of automatic teller machine for train stations to distribute digital magazines by downloading them onto cassettes for reading on a handheld device. Might this become a model for magazines and newspapers in the U.S.?

Source: Ethan Bronner, "For More Textbooks, a Shift from Printed Page to Screen," New York Times, December 1, 1998.