Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks

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 &quot;statistics&quot; about how great and effective their online learning platform was compared to paper books. Most of their &quot;statistics&quot; were things like &quot;students like them more than paper books&quot; or &quot;students feel like they learn more&quot; rather than any actual proof that these things are actually better for students.<p>Of course what they didn&#x27;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&#x27;t (they can just buy a new code!).<p>Thankfully, our department didn&#x27;t take the bait and instead worked on creating our own OER <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oercommons.org&#x2F;hubs&#x2F;open-textbooks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oercommons.org&#x2F;hubs&#x2F;open-textbooks</a> but too many educators are falling for it. My hope is that Pearson&#x27;s move will spur more faculty members to use and create more OER.

Reality tries hard to validate RMS&#x27; wild predictions... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html</a>

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

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.

Against the rising trend?<p>The Rise in Popularity of Printed Books Continues<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theprintingreport.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-rise-in-popularity-of-printed-books-continues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theprintingreport.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-rise-in-populari...</a>

This sounds like a raw deal for students.<p>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.<p>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.

This means in two decades we won&#x27;t have any record of what was in these textbooks, right? :&#x2F;

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

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

Great example of how to encourage piracy.

Not sure how it&#x27;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&#x27;d show during class, sometimes even just copied handwritten notes).<p>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.<p>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<p>This worked quite well by the way, we had a lot of material to study

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.

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.

Aka we don’t want you reselling them&#x2F; buying used books

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

If Pearson is down, does the exam get cancelled?

Hopefully it&#x27;ll open access to more people and be less wasteful. I&#x27;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.