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Article snippet: Sign up here to get the Smarter Living newsletter, a weekly roundup of the best advice from The New York Times on living a better, smarter and more fulfilling life. I always knew when one of my college friends came home from class. He’d enter with a thud. He would squeeze an arm through one of the straps of his massive, 30-pound backpack and slide the bag down his other arm before it went airborne, meeting the floor with a crash. Packed with a combination of a laptop, notebooks, textbooks, a change of clothes and more, I understood why he lugged it around all day: We lived far from campus and he needed all of those things throughout the day. I had the same problem, though maybe not 30-pounds’ worth of weight. But you don’t have to suffer the way we did. Some smart technology choices can lighten your load and keep you prepped for a full day of classes. The most depressing part of getting a syllabus for a new class was the “required reading” section. Yes, it was worse than seeing both a term paper and a final exam on the schedule. Forking over hundreds of dollars for textbooks that I might have ended up reading only a small fraction of never sat well with me. But by the end of my college years, I made an investment that saved me money, time and back pain: an iPad. I read everything on my iPad. Renting my textbooks as e-books was cheaper than renting hard copies or buying them used. Plus, I didn’t have to deal with the inconvenience of waiting for books to come in o... Link to the full article to read more