Putting Ads in Textbooks – Educational or Irrational?

words of wisdom vs. Words From Sponsors

Imagine reading about Marxist theories and McDonaldization and have the text cut off by a Big Mac ad. Does this look like an effective educational instrument to you?

With college students’ increasing dependence on electronic sources for their academic needs, the traditional textbook seems to be getting pushed towards the exit. Aside from college textbooks being heavier than your laptop, well, these bound wisdom-holders don’t exactly come in cheap (textbooks business earns $4 billion annually). However, techy students cannot rely on E-books alone as their references for papers and homework… for now at least.

J. Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, gives us further proof of the textbook industry’s slow exit, saying that publishers report that sales of a new textbook stop coming in almost completely a year after its release because students buy used copies when they’re already available. Switching from textbooks to E-books cannot be done overnight, as budget adjustments would have to be considered as well as the transfer of the publishers’ classic texts into E-books.

This gave Freeload Press of St.Paul an idea: why not give free e-textbooks – but with ads inserted in the pages?! This way, they still get to sell their stuff but for a lesser cost, thanks to the sponsors, who also have no qualms about this because in-class advertising reaches seven million students. However, no decent academic educator would really want to author such a book, imagine having the juice of your intelligence juxtaposed with that of Chuck E.Cheese’s.

Freeload Press claimed that 100 universities will be using its free textbooks, but the actual number is only 38. The success of this ad-inserted textbooks seems very dubious, and as Randall Stross of NY Times writes, “the juxtaposition of ‘Solution to Demonstration Problem’ on one page and an ad for a double bacon cheeseburger and fries on the next (the example is not hypothetical)” seems like a very bad recipe for educating our youth.

words of wisdom vs. Words From Sponsors

Imagine reading about Marxist theories and McDonaldization and have the text cut off by a Big Mac ad. Does this look like an effective educational instrument to you?

With college students’ increasing dependence on electronic sources for their academic needs, the traditional textbook seems to be getting pushed towards the exit. Aside from college textbooks being heavier than your laptop, well, these bound wisdom-holders don’t exactly come in cheap (textbooks business earns $4 billion annually). However, techy students cannot rely on E-books alone as their references for papers and homework… for now at least.

J. Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, gives us further proof of the textbook industry’s slow exit, saying that publishers report that sales of a new textbook stop coming in almost completely a year after its release because students buy used copies when they’re already available. Switching from textbooks to E-books cannot be done overnight, as budget adjustments would have to be considered as well as the transfer of the publishers’ classic texts into E-books.

This gave Freeload Press of St.Paul an idea: why not give free e-textbooks – but with ads inserted in the pages?! This way, they still get to sell their stuff but for a lesser cost, thanks to the sponsors, who also have no qualms about this because in-class advertising reaches seven million students. However, no decent academic educator would really want to author such a book, imagine having the juice of your intelligence juxtaposed with that of Chuck E.Cheese’s.

Freeload Press claimed that 100 universities will be using its free textbooks, but the actual number is only 38. The success of this ad-inserted textbooks seems very dubious, and as Randall Stross of NY Times writes, “the juxtaposition of ‘Solution to Demonstration Problem’ on one page and an ad for a double bacon cheeseburger and fries on the next (the example is not hypothetical)” seems like a very bad recipe for educating our youth.

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