Assimil phasing out physical books?

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Le Baron
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Mar 26, 2023 5:51 pm

rdearman wrote:I never claimed it was better, just cheaper for the publisher. :)

Yes this is true.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby iguanamon » Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:26 pm

Besides my issues with Assimil as a platform, which I won't go into now, their physical books are small and fat. Their chunky size, while I'm sure was designed to be less intimidating and more attractive to buyers, makes them less easy to read- in my opinion. If they were longer and wider, it would be easier to use. To me, that's a negative factor.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby tungemål » Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:35 pm

I also like physical books for language learning.

However, when it comes to E-books I feel we need to make a distinction between:
- reading on a computer or a tablet / phone
- E-ink readers like Kindle

I like reading on Kindle, and there are two major advantages compared to the computer: The screen is more comfortable to look at, and there are no distractions while reading (e-mail, browsing the web, this forum...). Obviously those advantages also applies to books.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby tungemål » Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:52 pm

In fact, I just bought a used copy of "Swahili" from Living Language. The course has good reviews and I might someday study Swahili :) It's out of print and Living Language seems to have become an online only company, so it might be a trend.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Airegin » Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:28 pm

iguanamon wrote:Besides my issues with Assimil as a platform, which I won't go into now, their physical books are small and fat. Their chunky size, while I'm sure was designed to be less intimidating and more attractive to buyers, makes them less easy to read- in my opinion. If they were longer and wider, it would be easier to use. To me, that's a negative factor.


I have yet to find a decent alternative that like Assimil has over 2 hours of audio in the target language. It is such a huge advantage over other courses.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby themethod » Thu Apr 06, 2023 7:18 pm

I want to throw in my 2 cents by addressing a few points here:

First, I don't think that Assimil and other companies are entirely misguided in what they're doing. For instance, if you look at the recommended resources for many language-specific subs on Reddit, most of them list half a dozen apps, websites, and audio courses each, while you're lucking to get a single book recommendation.

Neither the r/French or r/learnfrench resources pages mention a single book, as far as I could tell at first glance. No Assimil, not even a Teach Yourself or Colloquial. All of the "Grammars" are websites and the "Courses" are all apps. Even for languages with less available resources, like modern Greek or Serbian, you'll find little mention of actual textbooks.

I personally prefer paper books and avoid online-centric courses almost entirely. But I don't think that's the norm for the "average" learner.

That being said, I disagree entirely with the ever commoditizing and profit seeking of modern language learning resources, where "minor" languages are being almost completely ignored, in favor of an endless number of French or Spanish courses that are all basically the same thing. This is also why courses continue to be watered-down compared to older versions.

Ironically, this is like a race to the bottom for many individual companies. I mean, if even r/learnfrench doesn't recommend Assimil, I can't imagine their sales are booming with that crowd. And the type of people that seek out Assimil don't want e-courses.

Meanwhile, there are only so many people learning major languages, so it's not like there's enough profit to go around there either. Eventually the one company left with a Thai or Romanian course is going to clean up :lol:

But these companies will just continue to chase the big pie, even if their slice of it is smaller.

Second, on the subject of electronic vs. paper books as a learning medium, a distinction needs to be made between a dedicated e-reader, like the Kindle or Kobo, which uses an e-ink display and has limited functionality outside of reading, and reading on a website or app via laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Edit: I just realized that tungemål mentioned this a bit above me, so consider this a reiteration of his point.

It has been shown that any sort of "distraction" on-screen has a negative effect on attention and thus retention. When you are reading on your laptop, there are hyperlinks at the top of the page, there are other tabs in your browser, there are app icons in your taskbar, and there's the off-screen pull to check your email or your favorite forum, all of which draw on your attention. If you're on your phone, there may even be visible or audible notifications that ping you while you're studying.

Also, while I like my Kindle for reading fiction or foreign language texts, where I want to take advantage of the easy word lookups, I prefer paper books for non-fiction because it allows me to physically underline and write in the margins. As far as I know, there's plenty of evidence on the benefits of physically writing and interacting with information.

But also, I just like it, so I'm going to do it anyway.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby jeffers » Thu Apr 06, 2023 10:28 pm

iguanamon wrote:Besides my issues with Assimil as a platform, which I won't go into now, their physical books are small and fat. Their chunky size, while I'm sure was designed to be less intimidating and more attractive to buyers, makes them less easy to read- in my opinion. If they were longer and wider, it would be easier to use. To me, that's a negative factor.


I think the size of Assimil is perfect. Or was before I my eyes began to deteriorate! They are intentionally designed to be portable, the sort of thing that fits nicely into a coat pocket to be pulled out when and where it's convenient to read a page or two. Ironically, the original appeal was "ease of use" and "portability", and now the people who are more likely to want to use Assimil are the people who don't care as much for either feature.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Ichiro » Fri Apr 07, 2023 5:08 pm

I love the Assimil books. They're so substantially bound! Both the old-style turtle-back binding and the new-style perfect-bound ones. They're so durable! None have ever fallen apart on me, regardless of the abuse I've subjected them to. I'm sure this is a deliberate policy by the company, as they anticipate that the volumes will have a lot of the use over the course of the six months or longer it takes to complete a course.

For whatever my uninformed opinion is worth, I do not at all thing that Assimil is phasing out physical books. I'm sure they'd prefer you to buy the application as it is a cheaper distribution for them, but every new course for the past few years has always come out with the physical book available. I think that, once they've sold their initial print run, if they don't see the demand there they're not reprinting them. I don't think that's a policy of phasing out print books, I think that's just responding to market demand.

I don't know what it would take for them to move to Print On Demand, but I'm sure it's more complex than simply thinking they'd like to do it. I'd dearly love for Print On Demand to be a possibility with them, it's impossible to get hold of physical volumes for their Tamil and Cantonese courses without paying stupid prices. Of course, even if they do move to Print On Demand, they might not want to cannibalise sales of their newer courses where they have multiple generations in the same language, or choose to be associated any longer with some of the content in their older courses. The Tamils in their Tamil course are perpetually penniless, for example, and infrequently try and cadge money off each other. Someone might take offense.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Arnaud » Sat Apr 08, 2023 6:48 pm

Ichiro wrote:I don't know what it would take for them to move to Print On Demand, but I'm sure it's more complex than simply thinking they'd like to do it. I'd dearly love for Print On Demand to be a possibility with them, it's impossible to get hold of physical volumes for their Tamil and Cantonese courses without paying stupid prices. Of course, even if they do move to Print On Demand, they might not want to cannibalise sales of their newer courses where they have multiple generations in the same language, or choose to be associated any longer with some of the content in their older courses. The Tamils in their Tamil course are perpetually penniless, for example, and infrequently try and cadge money off each other. Someone might take offense.

I asked the question on their facebook page, about the POD. They answered "the book would be too expensive for the learner". I didn't insist. They simply don't want to do it.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby zjfict » Sat Apr 08, 2023 11:51 pm

I guess that is one way for Assimil to get language learners to learn French. :grin:
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