When California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger announced plans to save money by replacing school textbooks with digital ebooks last month, there were enough guffaws to go around. But make no beans about it -- it will happen. Maybe not this fall for public schools in California, but eventually.

Not to be deterred, Schwarzenegger hopes to start with science and math digital ebooks for high-school students beginning this fall. We'll see. Content developers (aka, "textbook publishers" in a previous life) had until this week to submit their wares for evaluation. Once the ebooks are in place, websites will be put in place to accompany and update the ebooks. That's the plan anyway.

But California isn't alone in promoting ebooks in the classroom. Starting this fall, every first-year grad student in the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department will receive an Amazon Kindle DX ebook to use in place of printed textbooks and research papers. Moreover, approximately 40 students will receive Kindle-based ebooks and other required reading materials free of charge, in a pilot program under the direction of Professor Ed Lazowska.

Among the graduate-level classes that will using the ebooks are: Software Engineering, Concepts of Programming Languages, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Computational Complexity, Principles of Database Systems, and Computer Systems Architecture.

The University of Washington isn't the only institution participating in the Kindle DX pilot program. Other schools include Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College, Arizona State University, Pace University, and the University of Virginia. Researchers monitoring the pilot program hope to find out more about the strengths and weaknesses of ebooks relative to traditional content delivery.

If nothing else, students participating in the program should be able to stand a little taller, what with one ebook instead of a half-dozen or so textbooks weighing down their backpacks.