Yes, it is inevitable. And I work in a very digital field (geospatial technology, particularly cartography and geographic information systems), which I entered in the early-1990s just as the transition of cartography to digital was nearing completion. I was in the first generation to only take cartography classes completely taught on the computer, without any training in old-school cartography using illustrator tools and paper on a light-table (although the traditionalist in me regrets missing out on that).
The library got some 'feedback' from me about it. As for having a grad student digitize them, I am the grad student and I do not have the time!
These days I can find almost anything I need with Google and a few accounts to special peer-reviewed publication services. I haven't bought a book on SAS or SQL in ages. If I'm not going online to get digitized sections from SAS themselves, I can often find class notes from some odd professor in San Diego. It's how for instance I scarfed an algorithm to figure out someone's age based on their date of birth. That's not as easy as you think.
This has become vitally important in my field as well. As well as with education, and the one area where I have become 'anti-book' per se is with textbooks. I am part of a small but growing group of instructors of all fields that are rejecting the traditional, outrageously-priced, changes-editions-every-two-years textbooks, which is also becoming an increasingly hot topic at national conferences. For example I am teaching Intro to Geographic Information Systems this Fall, the cheapest textbook that would be adequate is over $100 new, and most of the top-of-the-line books aimed at this course approach $200 new (
slightly less if rental or used copies are available,
sometimes less for digital copies). It is ridiculous for students to have to pay that much for one book for one class just because the instructor is too lazy to hunt down alternatives. So I make one of those textbooks "recommended" to satisfy the die-hard GIS students who really want or need the reference (although I do suggest to them that getting copies through inter-library loan work just as well for the purpose of a class), and then provide about 10 pages of links (organized by topic) to free online sources that cumulatively provide the same substantive information as a textbook. The key is to keep the students informed as to which links they need to be reading for any given lecture or lab. It also helps that I build my own lectures (including illustrative images and videos to help students visualize) and do not just teach straight out of a textbook (another lazy habit of too many instructors), so the textbook is truly supplementary for my courses. An added benefit in doing the course this way is that it exposes the students to where to find reliable information about GIS online.
The availability online of resources like the algorithm you needed, and the need for students to be able to find them as you did, is why I also do not just give my students all of the data sets they use in the lab portion of the course. Part of the lab instruction throughout the semester is in finding free, reliable spatial data online and incorporating them into the software to use for mapping or analysis, and of course we go over the potential pitfalls associated with getting data online. Invariably the fluid nature of the internet creates problems almost every semester with at least one of the data sets they need to find, which is a good lesson in and of itself but there are times when I think it sure would be easier to just give them all of the data so that I can control all of the outcomes!
My goal with taking these extra steps is that by the time they are finished with the course the students not only have an understanding of GIS processes, procedures, and technology, but also have a fairly good idea about how to hunt down GIS resources online.
I still read paper books. But as my presbyopia advances, I can see enjoying the ability to change font size on something I'm reading, or blowing up a picture to see detail. Even now I'll go outside, take a picture of one of my dragon fly buddies, bring the camera inside, upload the picture, and blow up the face to see the compound eye. That's better than what I can see in real life.
That is in my future as well, I already have to use bi-focals. The other important ability in digital books/articles is that many of them have searchable text, which is a whole lot easier than trying to remember on which page in which book I saw a piece of info.
But I am a book addict and so far I am not aware of a support group for that, so I will resist the conversion to digital reading for more than a few paragraphs for as long as I can!
One condition that I have read about, and have seen first-hand with my family, is that it is more difficult to unwind and get sleepy with digital reading at bedtime compared to paper reading. Both the light from the tablets and the ease in jumping around from one thing to another tend to keep the mind more stimulated, which makes fighting sleep easier. My wife seems particularly susceptible to this, she can lay in bed reading on a tablet for hours complaining that she is not sleepy yet, but if she reads a book or magazine she is out in 15 minutes.