Students arriving this fall at the University of Phoenix will have a lighter course load. The school is replacing traditional texts with e-books to become the first textbookless college.

Students in selected programs will get Microsoft's e-book reader software. For less than the cost of a textbook, they will pay a per-course fee to get access to interactive materials and up-to-date texts online. The software allows students to search, highlight, bookmark, print and even doodle. The university, which has 95,000 students at more than 100 locations across the country, aims to have almost all of them bookfree by next spring.

Elsewhere, nine schools, including MIT, Tufts and the University of Wisconsin, are also closing the books in selected classes.

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