Amazon's Kindle shop may be one of those shortcuts.
I was a little slow to the tablet revolution more due to cost than lack of interest. About a month ago though I caved and picked up an iPad2 for my professional use. While a lot of my time has been wasted playing Hidden Picture games, I have also been enjoying it as a digital reader rather religiously because I love books. Unfortunately, book reading is a very expensive hobby. In order to combat that I have been making use of digital libraries and free books available from the Kindle store on Amazon.com.
That of course made me think. What if schools could take advantage of their tablets to get access to books from other digital libraries or free books from digital distributors? To be fair, a lot of the free books I've gotten from Amazon have been amateurish at best. However, almost all what we would consider classics such as "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "Treasure Island" are available for free. These are books that are commonly taught in traditional classics based literacy programs anyway. By having free digital copies for students to use schools would save hundreds of dollars. Additionally, many apps for reading books allow people to highlight and add annotations. I myself have been prereading and annotating books for my new job on my tablet. While I don't think anything replaces the feel of a good book in my hands for novels assigned as required reading it could potentially eliminate a.) wear and tear on books and b.) costs in general for schools as books would not need to be repurchased over and over again.
One of the major drawbacks of this is unfortunately is that students generally do their assigned reading at home. This would require students to either have their own tablets or computers at home or for schools to check out tablets for them to take home. Owing to how I've seen students treat their electronics school checkouts would probably in the long run be much more costly than simply buying books. The other issue is in schools that need to save money the most there are more families that do not have access to computers or the internet at home.
Still, I feel that the idea has some merit and is worth thinking about. At the very least it is a very useful tool for tutors to have so they can amass large collections for instruction at a relatively low cost per book.