Textbooks in Short Supply Due to Quarantining for Coronavirus
“the imbalance between supply and demand is far worse than usual”
Librarians are quarantining books between borrowers resulting in a shortage. Why aren’t these books all available online? The technology exists for every book to be available to anyone.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Textbooks in Short Supply Amid COVID Quarantines
In the run-up to exams and midterms, the library at Roger Williams University is often busy with students trying to borrow textbooks and squeeze in some last-minute studying.
Access to these materials is always limited because the number of textbooks available is small. But this semester, the imbalance between supply and demand is far worse than usual, said Lindsey Gumb, assistant professor and scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams, a private liberal arts college in Rhode Island where students are back on campus this semester and participating in hybrid instruction.
As a safety precaution to slow the potential spread of COVID-19, librarians at Roger Williams are quarantining all returned print materials for 72 hours before making them available again.
The quarantining system is simple. When a book is returned to the library, a librarian wearing gloves and a mask places it on the lower shelf of a cart. The next day, the book is moved up a shelf. On the third day, the book is moved to the top shelf. The following day it is returned to the stacks.
An ongoing research project called Reopening Archives, Libraries, and Museums, or REALM, is investigating how long the COVID-19 virus survives on print materials, including hard and soft book covers and inside pages. The project is a collaboration between the OCLC, a global library collaborative; the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency that provides grants to libraries; and Battelle, a nonprofit research and development organization.
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Comments
Why aren’t these books all available online? The technology exists for every book to be available to anyone.
The textbook publishing biz has been fighting this tooth & nail for years. Any book in electronic format can be easily shared, even copied. Disaster! It’s the same reason they “revise” the texts annually—they don’t want anyone getting along just fine with older books bought on the—horrors!—used-book market.
Less importantly, college students are unable to use books in electronic format, because they can’t highlight everything in those damn yellow markers. It’s flying in the face of scholastic tradition.
I’ve seen several reports that some textbook publishers are giving cash kickbacks to college administrators and teachers.
I believe it given the worst of the worst books that have been adopted for students to buy.
Electronic highlighting would be very easy of the books were in PDF or virtually any other format. I’ve used highlighting in Word, and in various PDF editors for years.
Most textbooks for K-12 are junk today, anyway.
Textbooks? Did we go back to 1970?
My students don’t want e-books; they want paper books. Even with online classes, given the choice of the e-book (which is usually a bit cheaper and also doesn’t have a shipping cost) or the paper book, 90%+ choose the paper book.