Don’t Do this: Require books that are out of print

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in Dont Do This | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Don’t require your students to purchase books for your class that were last printed over 20 years ago, and are currently out of print.

Make the chapters of those books available as pdf’s.

2 Responses to Don’t Do this: Require books that are out of print

  1. Ken Allan says:

    Kia ora Gina.

    I get the reasoning, but does everyone get the relevancy of copyright issues with out-of-date books that are also out of print? And is it the same for all countries?

    If you are serious about this suggestion, and I assume you are, then presumably you also support the use of content that’s 20 years old – I’m not opposing this, BTW.

    It’s just that I recently left a comment on Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s video post where she extolled the virtues of eschewing content including text books and presumably pdfs of text books, never mind old text books.

    Ka kite

  2. gminks says:

    Ken – my problem is not that the content is required. It’s that it’s impossible to access the content! The book is out of print, so you can’t find it to purchase it. So, if you require readings from 25+ year old material, you should probably figure on providing the materials vs. making students purchase the materials.

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