This is ridiculous! Heavy bags are you kidding me!? What are you an 80year old lady? I think its much better to carry a backpack full of books and notebooks for a high school students . Kinda like an exercise to burn extra calories and build a bit muscle.. On to go! And im talking about general students not just you. Especially with all that junk food kids eat these days.
I dont know whats gonna happen if all kids gonna have tablets instead of books. For a college student tablet is ideal.. My gf back in 09 was spending around $500 on books per semester. And last two semester we switched to digital format it saved us a bit of money and of course no shipping cost and time. The other good thing is that if you dont have a book you can ask your student mate to take a screenshots of the pages you need and email them to you if of course he is using tablet . I used to take pictures of the pages that i needed with my dslr camera on lunch because some books take more than a week to get to you place and next day shipping isnt cheap extra $40 would surely hit your pocket.
* rant *
Sorry, SkyRocket, but you're incredulity is just a sign of ignorance. No study that I know of has shown a link between heavy textbooks and strong, fit children. However, there have been studies that link them with shoulder and back problems later in life.
But, ya know, you can just go on thinking how special and strong you were in high school and how "kids these days" are weaklings. Just, please, don't have kids of your own with this gf of yours.
*/ rant *
(sorry everyone, this kind of ignorance and self congratulation gets under my skin)