Printing ? But that would mean circumventing DRM to produce an illicit copy - surely an honest student would not do that !
[Edit] Cleared up some confusing stuff in there.
Oh god, MyMathLab. The second shittiest piece of software I was ever forced to buy. And at $120, it may have been the lowest value/dollar of any software I've ever interacted with.
Shout out to all the professors who either A) don't use textbooks, and only use free online resources or B) don't make us buy the textbook's shitty online service, so we can just go out and rent/borrow the textbooks for cheap.
If not, then "print" the whole damn thing to PDF documents.
The first two points are just asking what happens if you don't use the software. The answer is, surprisingly, you don't get the benefits of the software. The third point is slightly more interesting, but still irrelevant. This sort of thing is not designed to help students who are gifted enough to pass a course without reading the textbook. It is pretty obviously meant for those who need the textbook to learn, and will help those students and their teachers by showing which parts they struggled with, perhaps even unconsciously, and so on. Previously the only way to gain this sort of in-depth information about a student's learning habits was by one-on-one tutoring, following along as the student reads the material and answering questions as they come up. This is obviously an expensive process, although worthwhile, so automating it cheaply is a good thing,
It will inevitably be used to hassle those students, though. You know an easy way to make unusually smart students hate school? Just try to impose a time-consuming, slow, one-size-fits-all study schedule on them by force.
This sort of thing is designed to prevent one-size-fits-all schedules, while still managing to report and analyse the effectiveness of the material. Without analytics and metrics we have just been guessing, so technologies like active textbooks are going to give an amazing amount of insight into the best way to design courses to benefit the maximum number of students. We no longer have to worry about the smartest kids getting ahead of the class and becoming bored and disruptive, because their textbooks will download extra material designed to be of interest and use to them, for which they will receive additional credit. And so on...
What if the student blocks it with firewall or has no internet or breaks the assumption like by running it on Wine or whatever?
What if they simply don't read the coursebook because they can do without?