How to distribute this material to the class?

[LibbyG]

Maybe in requiring a hard copy you can collect them and grade the annotations? Lots of language of "I want to ensure that you're on the right track for this high-stakes assignment." Maybe that's a deliverable that feels less punitive than other approaches.

And maybe reading their annotations will actually tell you something useful about how they encounter the material.

[wuggish]

If this is true for your material, you can emphasize that if they print it themselves, they control the format. They can put it in a binder, folder, or use staples, print one-sided or double-sided, print two pages per sheet, etc. These things make a difference in reading comfort and the utility of a text, and it's nice to have that control. (As a student, I hated being given a course reading pack of research papers printed one page per sheet, one-sided, even though it was free.) Of course, this would require them to have been reading enough in general to have developed preferences.

[rhetoricae]

Can your campus bookstore do Print-on-Demand? Or a local copy shop that handles custom texts?  When I was an undergrad (way back in the dark ages), we had a fair number of custom texts that we had to purchase at the local copyshop for a nominal fee.

Another, more tech-oriented possibility is https://web.hypothes.is/, an online annotation tool which can be used either group or individually, and supports annotating webpages, publicly-available Google Docs, and PDFs. There's a lot more information on their site & in their FAQ.

[Deacon_blues]

I have used  https://web.hypothes.is/ in the classroom, and it is an excellent, free tool for group annotation (once the students get the hang of it).  But I don't know that it would necessarily work well for a text that has a glossary at the end.  I may be old fashioned, but I think a hard copy would be much more easy to work with for that sort of thing.