Old habits really do die hard. Dr. Robert Lishak says when the experiment was over and the entire class was surveyed. About 90 percent of students chose to use the actual text book over the E-Book.

“I'm like, a physical book type of person and I can't really stand in front of a computer for too long and read my text book, so I like to highlight and study,” said Auburn University student, Christine Kreitzer.

Sine highlighting the text is her way of making the information stick, Christine says spending $500 a semester on books is worth it.

“There were a number of students, the vast majority of students the ones who used the hard cover said, I just can't stand reading text on a computer screen. And so we were very surprised,” said Dr. Lishak

Surprised, that the most computer literate generation of young people doesn’t like to read on the computer. The E-Book experiment was the idea of a book representative from Cengage. He handed E-Book passwords out to students in Dr. Lishak’s “Survey of Life Biology 101” class for free!

“I'm not really for E-Books, because my biology class offers that and I didn't really take advantage,” said Christine.

“One student said, well you know, I carry my laptop in my backpack anyway and so this way I can have the text book and if its between classes and I just want to do a little bit of the reading, I can just open my laptop,” said Dr. Lishak.

So, is this a trend that’s before its time? Dr. Lishak says putting the popular “Harry Potter” books online would be the real test.

“And so what would happen if you gave an eighth grader the choice between E-Books and the "Harry Potter" hard-bound text. It would be an interesting experiment to try,” said Lishak.

The professor says the poll he took after the experiment did not include students who used no type of text book at all. He assumes there were some.