That's a pretty fair point. I also used my computer quite a bit, as I tended to be too impatient to walk down the hall to the program library unless I really needed to.
It would be great to have 1 single volume book you could carry around, or at least back and forth to work every day as a resident, which was complete enough to give you at least a little blurb and an image of all the major things. That would let you at least brush up on certain diagnoses or systems or tumor classes when the program library isn't at hand. But it really doesn't take long before you want to read about the same thing in a specialty book, or start scouring different books for a better image, etc., which is often hard to find except in a good pathology library or with good electronic access institutional journal subscriptions.
That said, as a 1st year, even in retrospect I would probably want one of the big all-encompassing texts, and/or the differential diagnoses text. I wouldn't rush to buy, though, and agree you should look over someone else's copy of several different ones, at length, before buying. Over time you can choose to build a personal library of reference texts as you start to see what's good and what you find useful. There's really no hurry, although that first couple of weeks of residency you may feel a little guilty for not having some at-home reading unless you've found an e-book/pdf of something useful somewhere...
