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Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

bbc.co.uk

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#13
Many textbook publishers, including Pearson, have already begun strongly encouraging professors to use additional online components from the publisher for things like homework assignments.

Even if you buy the textbook used, you still have to purchase an online access code from the publisher (often for $100+ for the semester).

The textbook publishers have been working on crushing the textbook resale market for years, and this seems to be the final nail in the coffin.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#14
post #2

This is evil on so many levels - no ownership - you only rent!

It will be interesting to see where this goes. After undergrad and grad school, the amount of times I’ve gone back to hardcopy books or course notes is so tiny that It didn’t justify lugging them around over many moves. (And I love books - prefer bookcases to wallpaper!)

The current model of forcing student to re-buy books that are only marginally updated on an annual basis is wasteful. The real question is will total cost go up or down. I’m ok if Pearson gets more profits if the costs to students goes down, along with complexity to faculty. (Faculty may get less money)

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#15
Just saying, I didn’t use a single textbook throughout my entire CS degree here. All of the course materials were available freely on our Moodle instance or through our library. Most of the course materials were produced by the lecturers, and where they had written a proper textbook, they just sent us the PDFs.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#17

Just saying, I didn’t use a single textbook throughout my entire CS degree here. All of the course materials were available freely on our Moodle instance or through our library. Most of the course materials were produced by the lecturers, and where they had written a proper textbook, they just sent us the PDFs.

I bought very few textbooks (Physics degree) but heavily used the ones available in the library, clearly YMMV.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#19
Hopefully it'll open access to more people and be less wasteful. I'm not a hugely analogue person, but have to admit, I much prefer non-fiction and text books in physical form over e-resources - for some reason it just goes in easier from the printed page for me.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#20

I think making textbooks more accessible to students will be a huge positive movement for education, especially in countries such as the states where education is already a multi billion dollar industry.

Yep, and phasing out print textbooks is only accomplishing the opposite.
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