Textbooks - What are they good for?

I am learning so much great information from my book selection.  An entire chapter is devoted to textbooks and their overuse and misuse in the middle and high school content area classrooms.  Textbooks are references and should be located next to dictionaries and encyclopedias.  Not meant to be read page by page with required reading each night.  Students aren't retaining all of the content heavy information and vocabulary and although might remember for a test, once that is over, all is soon forgotten.  So what should students read?  Think about what adults read.  On a daily basis I might read the online news, a magazine article, some statistical research data, technical instructions, emails, text messages, junk mail, letters, and that might happen in the first hour of my day too.  So students should also have a balanced reading diet of articles from magazines and newspapers, online research, primary source documents, photos, charts and graphs, and things of that nature.  The textbook is not and should not drive the curriculum.