Districts probably aren't going to care, as they are looking for a cheaper way to stay current. I recognize the prices are not as good as they should be, but realize the logistics are removed from the situation. The monster of having to manage all those books goes away with a keypress, but lands them squarely on a treadmill with the publishers controlling the dial.
Open school books? Maybe teachers will collaborate and make their own material? There's a lot of room in there...
The point is to look at genomic variations across the entirety of the human genome, not so much to match genomic variation to phenotype. What you're saying makes sense, but I think that is more a next step.
Here's the project explanation, but the data itself is 1000 complete (hopefully!) genome sequences. The hope is to find the variants, be it single nucleotide differences, copy number difference, etc. Where I work we use it to help figure out SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) to see if something we sequenced is a mutation or just a variant with no effect.
Depends, there are several sequencing technologies and they all have strengths/weaknesses. At my job, we use 454 sequencing from Roche and since it relies on PCR it has problems with tandem repeats and homopolymers that might not trip up other methods. (Sanger for example)
The real reason for a lot of this is personalized medicine, or rather more specific medicine. A gene translocation or even a SNP may be able to differentiate cancer types and change the course of treatment.
Any of them will make your deploy/config life great.