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Tablets vs. textbooks — 12 Comments

  1. What I remember is how heavy my books were, and how my arms would ache as I carried them to school–especially if it was also cello day (try being a kid carrying a huge stack of books plus a cello)

    I suspect that the heavy lifting problem has gotten worse since your- and my- childhood, as textbooks have increased in size with additional visual aids, such as pictures, maps, and tables.

    Tablets sound like a better solution. Though, as you point out, what is actually written in the textbooks or tablets nowadays doesn’t necessarily make students better educated

    Someone once pointed out that one could fill a $60 e-reader with out of copyright books that are part of the Western- and world- canon. Because they are out of copyright, they can often be acquired at no cost from places like Project Gutenberg. Also not as heavy as the hard copy books.

    http://www.gutenberg.org/

  2. You have plenty of company neo in those memories, the boomers were a bridge generation, born into a world without computers, VCRs, answering machines, cell phones, microwave ovens…

    Modern American textbooks have become a scam industry. The pricing of textbooks is obscene. Not to mention filled with leftist propaganda. I have a fine Samsung android OS that cost me $99.

  3. GB, Gringo & N-Neocon: I well remember the “A-Bomb Drills” which we had in Monte Vista Elementary School. NONE of our teachers or our books were telling us that those Soviet Reds had some valid points!! Aaahhhhhhh…For those days when Evil was called EVIL…Not an Ish-Shoe or an Inclusive Selfie-Hug!! Aaaahhhhhhh….. ((-:

  4. I have made the transition to a tablet. It was a bit touchy at first because tablets are touchy, but now I like it. Light weight and more portable than a lap top. I do draw a line at tech like google glasses.

  5. Ah yes those desks. With…. still with the hole for the inkwell! Not to mention decades of initials scratched into the surface with the point of the metal compass that you locked the pencil stub into. And then the vast collection of gum wads making the bottom an upside down field of mouth rubble.

    And the heavy textbooks plus the annual torture of trimming folding fitting and taping the manila book covers with the black printing and pictures and the lines for name and subject and “Home Room.”

    Good times.

  6. vanderleun:

    I used brown paper bags for book covers, plus tape. And they never worked all that well anyway.

  7. Ditto what GB and Y have written about the textbook scam in academia. I wonder why some enterprising students do not research the recent history of textbook uses in given classes, and then ask Professor X a question like this:

    “Professor X, this course has changed the textbook every 2-3 years. Why do we need the 8th edition, when the 7th or the 6th or the 5th… editions were perfectly adequate? All this does is pad the bank accounts of the publishing companies and the profs who wrote the books. Why do you submit to such a financial scam being perpetrated on your students? Why do you not investigate more financially equitable solutions for textbooks for your class?”

    Professor X: Crickets.[most likely.]

    BTW, after my undergrad years of getting a STEM degree at StateU, where a number of my STEM textbooks were written by my profs, I was pleased to find out during my time in grad school that those same texts from my StateU profs were widely used. Gave me a higher opinion of my StateU.

  8. Gringo, Democrats like to talk about war for oil and military industrial complex, but never notice how most of it is being profited on by Democrats?

  9. Gringo, I was once the guest in a Business Law professor’s home in Boulder, CO. Home? It was a mansion. Built with the proceeds of his personally authored text books, which were required (of course) in his courses. The results of 25 years of textbook royalties. Nice little scheme he had going there.

    Professor Reynolds has been putting the spotlight on the higher education scam for a while. Too bad someone didn’t start spotlighting this in the 1970s before it got so big.

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