Because it's a lot cheaper for my taxes to buy books.
Cheaper to buy books than PCs or personal CD readers? I wonder. At $50 bucks a pop, 6 books per student, 400 students in a Middle School, book turnover rate of, what, three years? You're talking about $120,000 worth of town property being hauled around by 13 year old kids. As opposed to, for example, getting a nearby corporation donate its out-of-warranty computers to the 10% of the school population who dont have or cant afford a computer?