Interesting point about textbooks
You can say what you want about using textbooks in class, often depending on the subject taught. The quality of the books differs of course and some prefer to have all of the material online. Still, I enjoyed reading this short article by Stephen Downs on this new start-up offering textbooks from 172 countries. I wonder if Norway is included here?
Perlego raises $50M to build out its vision of being the ‘Spotify for textbooks’
Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch, Mar 16, 2022
Given how bad Spotify is (think Joe Rogan, paywalls, anti-RSS behaviour) it’s not clear to me why anyone would want to be the ‘Spotify of anything’. Also, given how limited textbooks are, it’s hard to see why anyone would want to be the ‘Anything of textbooks’. But here we have it. Perlego also has VC backing, which means a drive to create profits in the short term. On the other hand, “The London startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles — textbooks, fiction and other literature that students are assigned as coursework.” And “It now has linked up with 6,000 institutions to fulfill class and course syllabi across 172 countries.” I’m not sure what ‘linked up’ means in this context. It also appears to spam search results – or as it puts it: “Perlego claims that in 2021, it intercepted 2.1 million searches online for ‘free’ pirated textbooks.”