Posted on 02/18/2020 12:31:26 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Pearson, the world's largest textbook publisher, announced that it is moving from a traditional to a "digital first" publishing model. This development upends several traditions that are more than a century old. It will bring about a digital transformation in textbook publishing that has been in the works for a long time and will fundamentally change the way college students get their educational materials.
The traditional model for publishing textbooks has been simple: An author, typically a full-time college professor, writes a textbook under contract with a publisher. The publisher puts out a print edition, gets course instructors to adopt it and sells it in college bookstores. If the textbook is popular, the professor will write an updated edition under a new contract every few years. A highly popular textbook will last through many editions; Paul Samuelson's Economics, for example, dates back to 1948 and is now in its 19th edition.
This model has serious limitations, which the digital age has thrown into sharp relief, making it increasingly untenable. First and foremost is the problem of used textbooks. Students generally don't need to hang on to their textbooks for more than a semester or two. It's perfectly legal to resell your textbooks and to buy used ones, so students do it all the time, and of course, publishers make nothing from resales. So a main reason that publishers push authors to write new editions of textbooks is to give course instructors reasons to adopt them; still, writing, producing, printing and distributing new textbook just because some small amount of material (or the formatting or cosmetics) has changed is quite inefficient.
Second, it's much easier nowadays for course instructors to find materials other than textbooks to assign to their students. Free web content, magazine articles, open educational resources and trade books
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Most of my engineering books were North of $200.
And if you go to sell them back, they give you around $30-40.
Real Knowledge —> Bit Bucket.
PCness to rule, especially in STEM.
“Most of my engineering books were North of $200.
And if you go to sell them back, they give you around $30-40.”
Textbooks were a huge scam. I went back when tuition was reasonable, but books, that’s another story. They would change a few sentences here and there, then reorder the chapters to render older editions barely usable. Buy a new book, $150, but it used, $90, sell it back, $25.
RE: Most of my engineering books were North of $200.
Those days are gone... and Pearson, owner of Addison-Wesley and Prentice-Hall knows this, hence the move to reinvent their products.
This is excellent news—the textbook scam had long outlived its usefulness.
It’s a racket.
I never sold a textbook. They’re all I have left from my college education.
ML/NJ
Hopefull, we’ll live to see the brick and mortar/in-person instructor government school racket dismantled. Online learning is vastly more efficient.
Anything published for the digital domain, especially the web, seem to be of lesser quality. No information but plenty of circular links.
I am confident that brick and mortar education is living on borrowed time.
The irony is that the education profession considers itself “progressive” when in fact it is fighting educational progress (in a digital world) tooth and nail.
what an odd thing to say..
Except for the junk classes, i kept all my textbooks. Digital was the big promise for years now. Ask the kids- they want paper. Like newspapers this will bode ill for us. Yet , Universities will continue to circular inclined plane the students on textbooks.
I love keeping books, and I have thousands of them.
However, for research on _obscure_ topics the web is totally amazing.
I kept most of my text books for many years. I finally dumped them after a recent move. I only referred to them twice in the last 30 years. Big waste of time and space.
The “ liberal arts “ courses will still be far-left pablum.
In fact, digital publishers may be even more emboldened to propagandize the impressionable young with nonsense.
I hate DRM'd ebooks
Well, the publishers will do everything they can to stop you from being able to do that with these spiffy ebook editions!
Highschool kids dont have textbooks and it reeally shows in science and math...they are simply spoon fed. I tutor kids in STEM courses. The highschool system in my area is a HUGE FAIL.
Highschool kids dont have textbooks and it reeally shows in science and math...they are simply spoon fed. I tutor kids in STEM courses. The highschool system in my area is a HUGE FAIL.
Material prepared for the web seems to be substandard. I'll give you an example. Microsoft used to publish paper books regarding their tools and libraries. They were reliable and filled with copious amounts of information. They did away with that and now publish information on the web. That material is scant and filled with links to even more incomplete information. Microsoft products can be used now only by observing sample software source files supported with either no comments or useless comments.
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