With students around the country returning to college campuses, Apple’s iPad is going to get its first large-scale test as a classroom supplement. Sales have been robust from word one, but because the tablet launched while most kids were busy studying for finals earlier this year, the coming school year is going to be important for those itching to see whether the iPad can contribute anything new to the world of education.

Across the country, schools themselves have been eager to jump on the bandwagon. Oklahoma State was just one of many universities that stamped its approval on a pilot program this year. “You’ll see this all over America in higher education,” university president Burns Hargis said. “Everybody’s trying to figure it out. My guess is it won’t be too long before these things are just ubiquitous.”

While some schools are trying to see how to integrate the iPad into the existing curriculum, others are taking a more proactive approach. According to the Baltimore Sun, the University of Maryland College Park has devised a new two-year program called Digital Culture and Creativity, which will not only look at ways that the iPad can be implemented into the classroom, but also explore it as an object of study in and of itself.

For all the unforeseen walls of the ivory tower that the iPad may break down in the future, the most obvious area for it to make an impact is by consolidating a bags-worth of books into one eminently portable device. After all, the iPad’s display is one of the best on the market for displaying the PDF format that has long been the textbook standard.

By the evolving standards of new technology, however, PDF textbooks are too static and boring. Or at least, they’re not nearly sexy enough to justify the purchase of a $599 tablet computer. That’s where companies like Inkling come in. They’re taking the content that once graced the page and jazzing it up with video and touch-based interactive elements. The result is something that resembles a game or movie almost as much as a textbook, which does a better job of engaging media-savvy kids.

“Our bet is that those tablets will change the way people consume content,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For as much as the old college bookstores were known for swindling students with their gaudy mark-ups and buy-back schemes that bordered on the criminal, the switch to interactive textbooks won’t be much of an improvement.  Companies like Inkling plan on charging as much as $85 for a textbook on the iTunes store. Students on a budget will have no recourse in the used bookstore as they once did, and minor revisions in standard textbooks will be enough to justify charging full price year after year.

Appropriately enough, it’s students themselves who seem to have maintained the most perspective on the iPad and higher education.

“The iPad isn’t going to make learning in the classroom any better or worse, “ said Dany Sanchez, a sophomore at Florida Atlantic University. “At the end of the day, it still comes down to your desire to learn.”