does this mean he'll too have to read the books that the other kids in the class will be reading?
It depends on the school and teacher. Here the district sends home a single book every summer which is
very easy, but with DS they haven't seemed to enforce reading it. (They do insist that parents compile a list of their children's home reading material every month, but we haven't done that either.)
A couple of different types of reading-material restrictions I've personally seen:
1. Restrictions in the classroom, to books available on the shelf. These sorts of restrictions seem easy to get teachers to agree to modify, by sending books from home.
2. Restrictions on what a child can read in, or check out from, the library. For example, at our school the librarian would physically restrict the K-1 students to a certain part of the library with very easy readers. It took a slight bit of advocacy to get that relaxed for DS.
... but I guess it comes with the gifted territory, right?