Print Still King for Students

Jennifer Howard

1. 

Despite the hype about e-books, the classic textbook hasn’t gone away. In fact, the hold-it-in-your-hands book remains the first choice for many instructors and students. Even as publishers scramble to produce new kinds of content for a digital learning environment, print is still king for many of the biggest-selling textbooks.

 

Textbooks Turn the Page

 2. 

Collectively the Norton anthologies have sold more than 15 million copies, says Julia A. Reidhead, editorial director of Norton’s college department. That doesn’t mean that Norton has ignored the Web or the current push in educational publishing to deliver online assessment tools and tutorials along with textbooks.

 3. 

The Norton anthologies, with their distinctive onionskin-thin pages, now come with an access code that gives students the key to online quizzes, photo galleries, audio recordings, and an archive of works that appeared in previous editions but are not in the current volumes. Students who rent the books or buy used copies can pay a small fee and get access codes of their own.

 4. 

Students want cheaper textbooks and have gotten more creative about acquiring them, but most aren’t calling for a digital revolution, according to some recent surveys. “The vast majority of students still prefer print,” says Michael Wright, director of college sales at Norton.

 5. 

Even publishers that have invested more heavily in new digital features say they’re not doing away with books but making them part of “customizable learning experiences,” to borrow a phrase from Pearson, the biggest player in the field. “We still print everything,” says Jerome Grant, the company’s chief learning officer for higher education. Pearson’s aim is not “to bias print or digital but to offer the experience in multiple formats.”

 6. 

Think of this as the era of “print-plus,” when the most popular textbook option remains a book — often printed and bound, sometimes digital — plus whatever extras and enhancements professors and students are willing to pay for.

 

The Comfort of Print

 7. 

Literature is not the only field where many students still show a preference for printed textbooks.

 8. 

Julie K. Bartley, an associate professor of geology and chair of the geology department at Gustavus Adolphus College, hears the sentiment from her undergraduates. “Our students don’t really want to have e-books,” Ms. Bartley says. “What I hear from them a lot of times is that they feel some sort of comfort in being able to hold the thing in their hands.”

 9. 

Her department’s decision to stick with a classic textbook has been driven partly by students’ preferences, partly by the college’s pedagogical philosophy. The “Principles of Geology” course that Ms. Bartley and her colleagues teach satisfies a core science requirement and serves as an introduction to the major. Any textbook it uses has to appeal both to general-educated students and rising science majors. “The assigned text, Earth: Portrait of a Planet, Fourth Edition, published by Norton, is neither excessively complicated nor excessively simplified,” Ms. Bartley says. “It’s right at the reading level of most of our students.”

 10. 

The book requires some careful reading attention, which remains a priority for the college. At Gustavus Adolphus, Ms. Bartley says, “we feel that every college student should be able to read a relatively complicated, unfamiliar text.”

 11. 

Students’ major concern about textbooks isn’t format but cost. “Probably the second biggest complaint in northern Minnesota after the weather is the cost of textbooks,” Ms. Bartley says. The department has used the book for several years. To accommodate the desire for used-book options, the instructors phased in the latest edition of the book so that the older edition could stay in use a little longer.

 12. 

So far, supplemental online material hasn’t been a deciding factor in choosing a textbook, according to Ms. Bartley.“We don’t feel like it’s central enough to the way we teach,” she says, because the course revolves aroundwhat happens in the classroom.

 

A Fast Transition

 13. 

Pearson, however, has placed bigger bets on new kinds of digital services. Jerome Grant, the company’s chief learning officer, describes how, at Pearson, “print is simply one of the outputs” of a program that emphasizes combinations of content, applications, platforms, and services. “Today the dominant model is a sort of text-media value pack,” he says, “where people use something like MyLab for homework or remediation.” (MyLab offers interactive content designed to draw students into course material and help them test their knowledge.) Those “value packs” often include a textbook, bundled with digital materials and services.

 14. 

Mr. Grant does not expect print products to vanish. “Do I envision a time when people won’t buy print? No,” he says.“Do I envision a time when the predominant distribution mechanism is digital? Absolutely.”

 15. 

Over at John Wiley & Sons, Tim Stookesberry sees signs of “a fast transition from a print to a digital world.” He serves as Wiley’s vice president and editorial director for global education. Less than 50 percent of the company’s higher-education revenue still comes from “pure print products,” he says, down more than 5 percent from two years ago.

 16. 

Decline does not spell doom for the old-school textbook, though. “Increasingly the issue is not either/or,” Mr. Stookesberry says of the nagging print-versus-digital question. “It’s a both-and-all conversation.”

【译文】

纸质书仍是学生们的首选

珍妮弗•霍华德

1. 

尽管电子书受到热捧，经典教科书却并未因此而消失。事实上，能捧在手中看的纸质书仍然是许多教师和学生的首选。即使出版商们争相推出适合于数字化学习的新内容，但是最畅销的众多教科书依然采取纸质形式。

纸质教科书与时俱进

2. 

诺顿出版社大学编辑部主任朱莉娅•A•蕾哈德称：诺顿选集总销售量已超过一千五百万册。但这并不意味着诺顿出版社忽视了网络媒介，或是忽视了目前教育出版业的发展趋势，这种趋势就是在出版教科书的同时，发布配套的在线测评工具和学习指南。

3. 

诺顿选集的纸张薄如蝉翼，现在已随书附带访问密码，让学生获取在线测验、图片库、录音材料,以及旧版本中曾有而新版本中没有了的内容。学生租书或购买二手书只需支付一小笔费用即可获取属于自己的访问密码。

4. 

近来的调查显示，学生们想要得到便宜的教科书，而且获取渠道也越来越有创意，但是多数学生并没有要求数字化革命。诺顿销售总监麦克•怀特说：“绝大部分学生仍偏爱纸质版。”

5. 

即使那些已经在电子书行业重金投入的出版商也声称他们不会放弃纸质版，借用行业巨头培生的话来说，他们要让纸质图书成为“个性化学习体验”的一部分。培生高等教育部的主任杰罗姆•格兰特说：“所有的东西我们都出纸质版。”培生的目的是既不偏倚纸质版也不偏倚电子版，而是让大家体验多种形式的出版物。

6. 

人们认为现在是“纸质书附加电子书籍”的时代，即：大多数畅销教科书仍选择纸质形式——通常是印刷装订的，有时是数字化的——这些附带的升级的东西，教授们和学生们都乐意花钱买。

纸质书的舒适性

7. 

学生对纸质教材的偏爱不仅仅是文学这一类别。

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古斯塔夫阿道尔夫学院的地质系主任朱莉•K•巴特利副教授常听到本科生的怀旧情绪，“我们的学生并非真的想要电子书，”巴特利说道：“我多次听到他们说，能够将书握在自己手里有一种踏实的舒服感。”

9. 

她所在的系决定坚持使用经典教科书，部分原因是由于学生们的偏爱，部分原因是由于学院的教育理念。巴特利和她的同事所教授的《地质学原理》是一门必修的核心理科入门课程。这门课使用的教科书既要能吸引一般的学生，又要能吸引理科新专业的学生。该课程的指定教材是由诺顿出版社出版的《地球：一个星球的肖像》第四版，既不太晦涩难懂也不太简单平淡”，巴特利说：“就大多数学生的阅读水平而言，该书难度适中。”

10. 

书需要细读，这仍是大学应予以优先考虑的事。古斯塔夫阿道尔夫学院的巴特利说：“我们认为每一个大学生都应该能阅读内容相对复杂、题材相对陌生的文章。”

11. 

学生们最关注的不是教材的出版形态而是价格。巴特利说：“在明尼苏达州北部地区，除了天气，人们抱怨得最多的就是教科书的价格。”该系采用此教科书已经好几年了。为了满足学生们使用二手书的需求，教师逐步引入教科书的最新版本，这样旧版本能用久一点。

12. 

据巴特利所言，迄今为止，在线辅助材料不是人们选择教科书的决定性因素。她说：“我们并不觉得这对我们的教学模式很重要”，因为这个课程是随课堂教学情况的变化而变化的。

快速过渡

13. 

但是，培生集团在这种新的数字产品服务上下了大赌注。公司首席学习官杰罗姆•格兰特是这样描述的，培生强调内容、应用、平台和服务结合在一起的出版模式，“印刷只是一个简单的输出”环节。他说：“现行的主导模式是一种课本+媒体超值包。人们使用‘我的实验室’之类来完成作业或补习。”（“我的实验室”提供了互动式的内容，旨在吸引学生们学习课程内容，帮助他们测评所学知识。）这些超值包通常包括了教科书，以及打包的数字化内容和服务。

14. 

格兰特并不认为印刷品会消失。“我想没想过什么时候人们将不会购买印刷品呢？没有。”他说，“我想没想过什么时候电子渠道将会成为主要发行途径呢？当然想过。”

15. 

而在约翰威立父子出版公司，蒂姆•斯图克斯伯力——该公司的副总裁兼全球教育编辑部主任——也注意到了“印刷时代到数字世界快速过渡”的迹象。他说公司高等教育版块收入中不足50%来自“纯印刷品”，跟两年前相比减少了至少5个百分点。

16. 

然而，销量下降并不意味着传统印刷版教科书的末日。斯图克斯伯力在谈及印刷版与电子版这一争执不休的问题时说道：“这个争论越来越不是非此则彼的问题，而是兼而有之的问题。”