education

School textbooks are on the way out – and pupils will lose so much with them | Sam Leith

[ad_1]

The world’s largest publisher of textbooks is preparing to throw in the towel on print and paper: Pearson has announced a digital-first strategy for its US market. New books will be published in electronic rather than print form, and Pearson will update its physical textbooks much less often from here on in. The UK is expected to follow in due course.

Students in the US, who increasingly opt to rent secondhand textbooks rather than buy them new, are eating into Pearson’s profits; so it has decided to cut the problem off at the source. Or, as it puts it, “It is time to flick the switch in how we primarily make and create our products.”

No longer, in the words of Jaques, will one of the ages of man be “whining schoolboy, with his satchel/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school”. Rather, his shining morning face will be reflecting the glare of a monitor, with a Kindle Fire in his blazer pocket he will have no need of a satchel, and it can’t be long before the journey to school will be a question of logging on from bed.

It’s pretty easy to see why electronic-only publishing makes sense for Pearson. It benefits from what’s sometimes called near-zero marginal cost; or, in less fancy terms, it can bang out as many copies of its textbooks as it likes at the push of a button and doesn’t have to pay for paper, printing, warehousing or distribution. Even if it halves the price – which I dare say it won’t – Pearson’s profits per copy will soar.

And there are, granted, certain advantages to students in the e-model, too. Electronic texts can be remotely updated, so you don’t get stuck owning (or renting) an out-of-date version of the book. Video and audio and interactive doohickeys will come as standard and you can, presumably, share highlighted passages with your peers over the internet. (What it means for authors has yet to be seen.)

But I don’t write here as an analyst of industry trends. Rather, as someone who remembers with Proustian vividness owning a copy of RD Wormald and DW Blandford’s Path to Latin: Book 1, whose title had been modified in fountain pen (as was the unalterable rule) to A Bath Before Eating. As someone whose little atlas of the world had every remotely rude-sounding name in its index, from Juan de Fuca to Wanaka, dutifully picked out in yellow Stabilo Boss highlighter. As someone whose poetic nom de plume was “TS Troot”, taken from a misspelt label to a transverse section of a root in a GCSE biology textbook.

If you no longer have – and no longer own – physical textbooks, you are not only spoiling your present but robbing your future self of the embodied memories of childhood. As Victoria Coren once memorably pointed out, the common complaint that you can’t read an ebook in the bath is (as well as wrong) irrelevant: who reads much in the bath anyway? But there’s more to physical books than that.

Memory is a physical thing. It’s bound up with sight and heft and touch and smell. Schoolbooks – be they portals to intellectual delight, the object embodiments of intellectual drudgery, or, as usually, both – are part of the fabric of the experience of school, instant evokers and reminders. How can you compare a series of disembodied e-texts passing like ghosts through a series of interchangeable readers? Since memory is so bound up in learning – spatial memory; what sits where on the page, even – it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that learning itself will be harder when physical textbooks are left behind. I fancy even plagiarism from a physical textbook – with the need at least to photocopy or transcribe – involves a degree of effort that helps the plagiarist to learn something.

Physical annotations in old textbooks are a time-travelling device, an aide-memoire, or the filaments that bind a community of learning across the generations (look: whoever defaced this book drew dashes instead of teardrops for the spunk!). If and only if Pearson promises to make annotation and vandalism as easy and as satisfying and as durable as they were in print – and to beam the smell of new textbooks and the wrinkles of the old ones to users through the cloud – will “digital first” be worth welcoming.

Sam Leith is literary editor of the Spectator

[ad_2]

READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.  Learn more