Reading Your Textbooks Online

4 Jul, 2008 Ramblings

Colorado Community Colleges Online just signed a deal with the Pearson Publishing Company to grant college students access to their schools’ required textbook online for a fee of $49. This is not a bad deal but the party that will profit more from this deal is the publishing company, Pearson, because basically, they will cutback on the production of the books. This deal is not clear because it doesn’t state if the student is allowed to download the book and save a copy for her. I believe this deal is good for small books i.e. books with small pages. Books with a lot of pages will be a pain to read. It is because you cannot reference to a page as quickly as possible if it was in hard copy. This deal is good for science subjects such as chemistry because it would Pearson would like to provide interactive diagrams to aid in better understanding of a concept. For instance, chemical bonding would be explained better through interactive diagram (I used chemical bonding as an example because I basically memorized the bonding with no understanding of how bonding occurs). Weighing both negative and positive effects, I would choose hard copy over electronic copy. I hate reading long post or topic online. I would become less interested and wander away.