
Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks - JohnHammersley
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48998789
======
jccalhoun
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 paper books" or "students feel like they
learn more" rather than any actual proof that these things are actually better
for students.

Of course what they didn't say is that online DRMed platforms give them 100%
of the profits instead of losing money to used books or giving the bookstore a
cut and they danced around the fact that students loose access to the material
after a year so even if they wanted to use the material later on they couldn't
(they can just buy a new code!).

Thankfully, our department didn't take the bait and instead worked on creating
our own OER [https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-
textbooks](https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks) but too many
educators are falling for it. My hope is that Pearson's move will spur more
faculty members to use and create more OER.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Cengage was terrible to use as a student but it wasn't the worst. Trying to
cite the resources from the courseware is impossible as you manually have to
type it out removing any benefit and making it literally less useful than a
physical book especially if you only have a single screen. The worst online
platform I've used it took me a week to figure out the terrible UI to actually
use the textbook part, you had to go into the text section, know exactly the
section you were going to and then browse the pictures of the physical
textbook. Questions for homework build only be accessed through a submenu of
this section. Every 10 minutes you'd be prompted to take a break, ruining your
concentration, and every hour you'd be signed out. It was a nightmare. I much
prefer the books.

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

~~~
donquichotte
Written in 1997. My picture of RMS is slowly changing from religious zealot to
apocalyptic prophet.

------
ncw96
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.

~~~
danaos
Instructor resources have always been distributed separately afaik. If you're
a student you can access free digital content from their website[1].

Am I missing something?

[1] [https://media.pearsoncmg.com/bc/abp/engineering-
resources](https://media.pearsoncmg.com/bc/abp/engineering-resources)

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Students are often required to solve self-checking homework problems online,
and they can only do that with the access code.

------
noodlesUK
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.

~~~
cf141q5325
No idea why this is downvoted, same thing here.

Ripping off students through overpriced mandatory textbooks is not a worldwide
phenomena. Through CS Bachelor and Master I too have never had to buy a
coursebook. The few books that were needed for extremely standardized courses
like math 1-3 were available in sufficient numbers in the library.

It takes two to force students to spend so much on books, a publisher can
price their books anyway they like if there isnt a university forcing their
students to use them. That for profit universities dont have a problem with
that is not surprising.

~~~
reallydontask
> Through CS Bachelor and Master I too have never had to buy a coursebook.

It is entirely possible that your experience might be relevant for CS, I don't
know I did a Physics degree, but there are a lot more degrees out there than
CS or Physics, for which your experience might not be representative, in other
words: There probably are degrees out there that do require the textbooks or
if not actual requirement, it makes the learning experience better.

------
achow
Against the rising trend?

The Rise in Popularity of Printed Books Continues

[http://theprintingreport.com/2018/05/03/the-rise-in-
populari...](http://theprintingreport.com/2018/05/03/the-rise-in-popularity-
of-printed-books-continues/)

~~~
jjeaff
People do like paper textbooks a lot. But the used textbook market is as
efficient as ever and publishers want more revenue. They don't make any money
when you buy a used textbook and it's expensive to scramble the chapters and
end of chapter questions and reprint every other season. Plus, you have to pay
all the sales people to convince the clueless professors that they should
upgrade to the new edition each year.

Perfect example of rent seeking.

------
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.

~~~
jjeaff
The percentage of college students and grads who ever reference their old
textbooks even once has go to be vanishingly tiny. With the exception of
perhaps a few highly technical programs.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
This means in two decades we won't have any record of what was in these
textbooks, right? :/

~~~
your-nanny
interesting point. I suppose in LOC tho.

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

~~~
reallydontask
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

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

Nope. We just can't afford _not_ to rent.

~~~
ethbro
When owners of capital collude to remove owning as an option, they become sole
arbiters of pricing.

So "afford" becomes a bit odd when someone simply expands their profit margins
as much as the market will bear.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Expands their profits beyond what the market would bear were it not for lock
in, lack of competition, and no consumer choice in the way they consume. They
only choice you have is not to go to school.

------
your-nanny
For someone who still has many many textbooks sitting in their shelf many
years after graduating, I find this very sad.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Same here. I buy a lot of textbooks for fun reading myself on topics like
economics, physics, and math where the books don't really change much or where
the reading is better in book form.

------
cf141q5325
Great example of how to encourage piracy.

------
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

------
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.

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IntegralCalcs
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.

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

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cududa
Aka we don’t want you reselling them/ buying used books

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oyebenny
Sweet, now we can go and pay $200 for a digital copy of a book instead of a
$250 copy of a physical book. lol

~~~
jjeaff
More like $200 for an online copy vs $50 or less in the common occurrence that
used print textbooks are available. Or even older editions for $10 or less.

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gourou
If Pearson is down, does the exam get cancelled?

~~~
ASalazarMX
The money a class pays for their access codes could finance a couple of years
of DDoS instead.

Edit: Not really. Seems like a common DDoS attack costs about $20 per hour,
and an access code costs about $100 USD. Each student could buy about 5 hours
of DDoS.

~~~
hakfoo
You don't need to black out the platform for years.

If you covered one or two critical weeks (say the weeks just before and during
final exams and midterms), per semester, you're looking at 672 hours of
downtime or less. Even a large availability loss-- say, down 50% of the time
in peak hours-- would be enough to make the program look risky and fragile.

A 50-student lecture could finance that.

------
wastedhours
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.

~~~
vikramkr
I dont see how this does anything other than restrict access. They're killing
the used book market.

~~~
wastedhours
I've always heard Pearson has been reasonable on the global education front,
so might expect more buy-one-give-one style offers to emerge in the future
(although perhaps naive on my part there).

~~~
cf141q5325
Where did you hear that? Their push to get Professors using their pay walled
online services as mandatory coursework looks like quite the opposite.

