3 ms·
That Digital Textbook? Your College Has Billed You for It
- gnicholas 7y agoI was confused the first few times I heard companies bragging about their student-friendly "inclusive textbook" programs. I thought they were congratulating themselves for finally making textbook platforms that are inclusive of people with disabilities, [1] and that's why they were calling them "inclusive textbooks." But that's not it at all. It has nothing to do with inclusion — these are mostly-mandatory (you're supposed to be able to opt-out) programs. And if you look at the PR release from Pearson, which is linked in the article, you can see that's it's not designed to be good for students, but rather for the publishers' bottom-line: > Our digital first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues. 1: digital textbooks are infamous for having very few, if any, accessibility features. Some of the largest platforms have used image-based PDFs, which are terrible for people with low vision, or anyone who wants to read their textbook on their phone.