Both of my kids are classical music students. With extremely rare exceptions, everybody seems to use an iPad, latest and biggest model, with a page turning pedal. Virtually all classical material has been scanned or digitized. Not so in my world, jazz. My band's charts are still all on paper.
Why the iPad? There may be an aspect of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." If your iPad fails or runs out of battery (it happens), other people will be sympathetic. If you bring something "weird" and it fails, it will be because you tried to cheap out on something weird, and it's your fault.
You'll get less screen area than you might expect unless the screen has the same aspect ratio as typical 8.5x11. I own a 10" tablet that's sufficient for reading lead sheets (melody plus chord changes) but am seldom motivated to actually use it. I already know most of the standards that are likely to be called on a gig.
My jazz group would just take any paper sheets and either re-transcribe them or take photos/scans, send em to Dropbox, and then read them in forScore. Our whole repertoire was in Dropbox in case we had somebody sit in on a gig who needed to play lead lines or something. With Scribd and digital realbook collections, the amount of music that’s around digitally is mind blowing.
As for why an iPad, I think it’s more that either folks already have iPads, or they get them because “creatives” like using apple products. Same reason musicians will often get a MacBook instead of a dell even if they don’t need it for any particular reason. Both of those reasons would lead to the network effect of folks asking their friends/colleagues what they use, and then buying an iPad because of that.
Big-band music is sadly in much worse shape for digital preservation. Anywhere from 16 to 19 parts per chart, 2 to 5 pages per part. A few band members have been individually digitizing their "book," but there hasn't been a coordinate effort.
My other band, a quartet, is more like what you describe. And anything new is going to be in digital format.
Why the iPad? There may be an aspect of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." If your iPad fails or runs out of battery (it happens), other people will be sympathetic. If you bring something "weird" and it fails, it will be because you tried to cheap out on something weird, and it's your fault.
You'll get less screen area than you might expect unless the screen has the same aspect ratio as typical 8.5x11. I own a 10" tablet that's sufficient for reading lead sheets (melody plus chord changes) but am seldom motivated to actually use it. I already know most of the standards that are likely to be called on a gig.