As digital learning tools continue to reshape education, the debate over their effectiveness compared with traditional textbooks remains unresolved. This study provides fresh insights by examining how important feature-level factors—portability, navigability, and visual appearance—shape users’ confirmation and satisfaction with iPads and textbooks. Through a within-subject experiment conducted in a real classroom setting, 82 undergraduate students enrolled in an operations management course at a U.S. public university participated in a two-phase study over two weeks. To ensure ecological validity, students used either an iPad or a traditional textbook to solve decision science problems in their regular classroom environment before switching to the other tool in the second phase. At the end of each phase, participants completed a questionnaire assessing their perceptions of the tools and their learning experiences. This study’s findings challenge the intuitive belief that digital tools are always better than traditional ones. Furthermore, this study systematically examines the advantages and limitations of each tool regarding their detailed features, thus deepening the understanding of their role in digital learning adoption. This research offers a comparative analysis of electronic and traditional educational tools, which will provide insights for optimizing electronic education and responding to the changing landscape of learning technologies. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025.