Anti-Books University

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Clarissa

March 5, 2014

A bunch of administrators decided that it is necessary to stop using books at the university. Everybody is supposed to switch exclusively to digital textbooks. This will cost a packet to the students and the university. But Apple will get enormous profits and so will Amazon. Remember my post on who the idiots are that agree to rent digital books from Amazon for enormous amounts of money? The answer has been found: universities.

Apple sends representatives to universities to “educate” professors on how to teach using these e-books. Remember the post I wrote yesterday about the way school-teachers in Chicago are trained? Apple representatives are worse.

Of course, the faculty members in the Humanities resist the abandonment of actual books in favor of this ultra-expensive and enormously inconvenient e-book option that limits academic freedom and defrauds students for the sole purpose of enriching Apple and Amazon.

But the Schools of Nursing, Engineering and Management scream down the Humanities, telling them that they are reactionaries who don’t understand the beauty of technology.

I just discovered this is happening at my university.

Are you sure it isn’t happening at yours?

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18 responses to “Anti-Books University”

djiril

March 5, 2014

Meanwhile I have a teacher this semester who spent about five minutes the first day telling the class how much he hates e-mail and then told us that he expects us to do the majority of our studying on the textbook website.

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Evelina Anville

March 5, 2014

Oh wow. I completely know what you mean. There is talk of our library getting rid of all the books because books are “dated.” Fortunately, we have some wonderful librarians who will not let this happen. There are simply times when a book is the cheapest, most convenient, and best option for study, reading, and inquiry. The “no books” trend makes me see red.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  The problem is that our tuition fees include textbook rentals and we can’t assign any textbooks outside of what is provided by the textbook rental services. Now this already paltry selection will be further limited by what is available and can be rented in the form of e-books.
  
  I don’t know how it will be possible to prevent students from using Google Translate during tests or compositions when they will, of necessity, have to access their (rented) iPads during these activities. Extra expense, extra hassle, extra limitations – and all for what?
  
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j.

March 5, 2014

how many of these boosters use textbooks? at my last post i was shocked to find that instructor in my own department were assigning textbooks priced in excess of $100, rather than assigning far cheaper original texts (which are also a better investment, as far as book ownership goes). and this is in a humanities field. (as an undergraduate working in the sciences, i didn’t even have to pay that much for extremely limited-audience, hardcover textbooks for upper-level courses, let alone the big tent warhorses used for things like calculus or physics.)

nursing textbooks are truly ridiculous, though, so perhaps genuinely portable, cheaper texts are hard to turn down there.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  The thing is, when our textbook acquisitions department buys, say, 100 nursing textbooks, we own them forever and can lend them to students for as long as we choose to. An e-book rental means we will pay for the rental every year. So it’s the same high price paid over and over and over again by the students who are left with no actual book on their hands after the rental contract expires and the university that doesn’t possess the actual book either.
  
  Financially, this is a disaster to everybody except Amazon and Apple.
  
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Pen

March 5, 2014

The introductory physics text for majors in print cost me nearly $300. The following year, everyone was required to buy the e-book from the publisher instead. The e-book is much cheaper, but a lot of the people I’ve talked to would have preferred a print book because they say they have a harder time concentrating on a screen. I don’t think they’ve required it since, just offered it as an option.

On the other hand, my Humanities II professor told us that if for whatever reason we couldn’t get our hands on a copy of the current book, we could probably find it for free on Project Gutenberg or elsewhere. This only worked because we were reading a lot of older texts, though.

Other than that and a decline in printed handouts in my Humanities classes (but not my physics or math classes), I haven’t noticed the e-book requirement trend at my school. It’s always been an option, though.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  I noticed that my students hate the e-book version of our language textbook. They don’t want to use it at all. And I don’t want to make them because I also find it impossible to do any serious work with a digital book. I can’t find my way around it, it disturbs me when I can’t turn over pages, it’s just a waste of time.
  
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el

March 5, 2014

// Remember my post on who the idiots are that agree to rent digital books from Amazon for enormous amounts of money? […] Remember the post I wrote yesterday about the way school-teachers in Chicago are trained?

Truly, a sixth sense regarding what to write about and when. 🙂 😦

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  Scary shit, eh? 🙂 And this is happening right after I predicted the arrest of the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, too.
  
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Kyle

March 5, 2014

E-books are a convenience for when travelling so you don’t have to carry a stack of physical books, but otherwise, I MUCH prefer physical books over e-books. There is just something very lovely about holding a physical book, the smell of the pages, etc…I find it very saddening that some think physical books should be done away with because they are “dated” or whatnot. How exactly they are dated is beyond me, as e-books are not superior (at least in my opinion), they are just a different means of communication.

And for those that think all physical books need be replaced with e-books, heaven help the world if the power grid ever goes down for some reason.

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Tim

March 5, 2014

We have had a professor who tried to steer everyone towards e-books and fell quite badly on his nose 🙂

His problem was, that in presentations and scripts he would always refer to pages in the books he used in his classes. Problem was, that for the e-book format he chose, the size of your readers screen determined how many pages the book had.

So you could find yourself looking for page 112 in a book that has only 90 because your laptop screen is so big. And 300-something when opened on your phone. It was hilarious 😀

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1. Tim
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  One annoying thing with e-books is that you need one reader per e-book you want to have lying open in front of you. I don’t know how you guys do research but I usually have 2 to 4 books lying open in front of me, so I can quickly change and cross-reference. Trying this with e-books would mean buying a couple of kindles or something like that.
  
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NancyP

March 5, 2014

There are few excuses for expensive e-books in humanities courses. Students routinely sell dead-tree books to each other, and a lot of the humanities texts are inexpensive even when new – for a lot of English-language classics, one can get new books for under 10 bucks. I can see using e-books for out-of-print items. Ridiculously, I still have a very large percentage of my college course books 30+ years on…. but I was just re-reading a translation of the Aeneid, last read some 35 years ago.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  Our students don’t buy textbooks, so there is no need to resell. But the e-book rental for the students will cost almost 4 times more than paper books!
  
  Besides, this is a form of censorship because MANY of the books we use are not available in digital version.
  
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paranoid

March 5, 2014

It happened at a school up the road from you in the last year. I thought it was an insanity localized to that campus.

Click to access tabletfaq.pdf

http://news.siu.edu/2013/01/012313cjm13009.html

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 5, 2014
  
  “Research indicates that using e-textbooks and tablets improves student learning. David Crain, assistant provost and chief information officer, cited studies indicating that 90 percent of students who own tablets believe the computers improve their educational experience.”
  
  – Oh, of course, if students believe it, then it has got to be true. And if students like Googling crap online, that totally means we should all get rid of books immediately. Idiots.
  
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Shakti

March 6, 2014

AND this is why I don’t have book e-reader. DRM & built in obsolescence aren’t problems for actual books. Of course they keep changing around the textbooks every year, but you still have your version of the book. And I say this even knowing how heavy actual textbooks are.
I paid $1000 a year for textbooks; but at least they were mine. I’d be pissed to pay the same amount for a rental.

The Kindle and Nook reps always sidestep me whenever I ask about obsolescence. They get panicky.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 6, 2014
  
  This whole plan is a logistical nightmare. My most popular course which it took me years to design relies on a textbook that doesn’t exist in the e-format. It is from another country, and the chances of it getting digitalized are slim in the extreme. I haven’t found an equivalent of this textbook, and now I will have to redo the entire course? Why? Students love the course. This tramples on my academic freedom and forces me to limit my teaching to the books Amazon has chosen for me as relevant.
  
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