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Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#41

Post by II2II »

This sounds like a raw deal for students.

I kept all of the textbooks relating to my major for several years. They were good reference materials while completing the degree and were useful as supplementary resources. By the time the second year of undergraduate studies rolled around, the faculty started assigning textbooks that were intended to serve as introductory material to graduate studies. By the time the final year of undergraduate studies rolled around, at least half of the assigned books were intended to build professional libraries.

From an educational and professional perspective, this drive towards rented textbooks is doing a disservice to students. It is treating education as disposable while forcing students to pay even more to build a library that will serve them well in their career.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#43

Post by trevyn »

Tomte wrote: post #4

Reality tries hard to validate RMS' wild predictions... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

I find it interesting how dystopian “warning” fiction often ends up being used as an instruction manual. If we wrote more optimistic fiction, maybe simpler minds would have a wider variety of instruction manuals to choose from?

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#44

Post by Finnucane »

My personal experience with Pearson is somewhat limited--I temped for them as a copyeditor for about a year so about ten years ago--but this is not surprising. Even then they were already building the online material and pursuing draconian cost-cutting measures (my gig ended when the whole copyediting department got laid off). So if half their revenues are coming from digital now, that means the print books--which are very expensive--are less profitable. So not printing, warehousing, or shipping them saves a lot of money. Plus the staff needed to manage that.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#45

Post by black6 »

jccalhoun wrote: post #36

As a professor, I am not surprised about this. Publishers are pushing their online platforms hard. A few years ago Cengage came and gave a whole dog and pony show (with free lunch to ensure as many of us as possible showed up) with all these "statistics" about how great and effective their online learning platform was compared to paper books. Most of their "statistics" were things like "students like them more than p…

Cengage pissed me off in that I had to purchase access to the online system in order to do my homework (organic chemistry course). I couldn’t get over the fact that I had to pay a third party for the ability to submit my homework to my professor. I ended up being the squeaky wheel and the professor just so happened to have a couple-few licenses he could hand out to students.

It’s a dirty f’ing system when my grades are held hostage by a publisher.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#47

Post by ailideex »

achow wrote: post #18

Against the rising trend? The Rise in Popularity of Printed Books Continues http://theprintingreport.com/2018/05/03/the-rise-in-populari...

I think they think that their exclusive rights to their books will make the trend irrelevant as people will have to work through them to get access to their books.

Hopefully people will just flock to alternatives.

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#48

Post by ailideex »

reallydontask wrote: post #3
tshanmu wrote: post #2

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

You see this is because the new generations expect to rent .... What a lot of horse manure In theory this model makes sense for a lot of textbooks, in practice I suspect the price difference between buying and renting for a year won't be that big at all. I would imagine that majority of books would be rented for a year, academic year anyway

> You see this is because the new generations expect to rent ....

Why do you say that?

Re: Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

#50

Post by Aardwolf »

Not sure how it's today but 15 years ago at the university I went to, professors all made their own course books (sometimes in real textbook form, sometimes simply the bunch of slides they'd show during class, sometimes even just copied handwritten notes).

These were printed and bound (apparently some decades before that the binding had to be done by the students) at some local shop and we bought them as students for something between 7 to 25 or so euros each.

There were a few courses that recommended a particular actual real professionally printed book in addition but those were quite rare in fact, and usually an optional recommendation

This worked quite well by the way, we had a lot of material to study

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