Sorry, there just is no substitute for textbooks yet. I'm in my mid 30's working on a technical Ph.D., and even when I can download academic materials I just end up having to print them out. And believe it or not, the cost of printing out a book and having it bound at Kinko's is often more than it would cost to buy it professionally printed and bound from a publisher.
Multimedia has its place, but only as a supplement to text-based instruction.
Same here. I have to annotate my tech reading. Some of the better instructional CDs have a notes feature that allow comments... I can go with that...