Assimil phasing out physical books?

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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby rdearman » Sun Apr 09, 2023 8:27 am

Arnaud wrote:
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.

The book would be too expensive for the learner if they are trying to keep the same profit margin as they have by having bulk print runs. Typically, the publisher would get about 12% of the cover cost of a book, from which they have to pay cost of business and make a profit. For a POD book run, the publisher might get 3% if they are lucky. So they'd have to either jack up the price to something stupid to cover all their costs, or make a loss on the POD books.

So it makes sense for them to ignore POD.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Ichiro » Sun Apr 09, 2023 10:39 am

For what it's worth, I would pay something stupid for Assimil Cantonais or Assimil Tamoul. Just not as stupid as the Ebay prices these books are posted for.

I doubt Assimil will switch to Print on Demand just for me, sadly. It makes sense the will continue to ignore POD.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby rowanexer » Sun Apr 09, 2023 10:42 pm

themethod wrote: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.


This is a really important part and it's scary how fast it's changed. When I was learning languages only 15 years ago the first thing anyone would do would be to go to the bookshop or the library and grab a "Teach Yourself XX". And now it's like the only way anyone can think of to learn a language is through an app. I think that an app can do a lot of good things with the interactiveness of the format, but honestly, so many apps, especially the free ones, are just vocabulary trainers.

Probably serious language learners will eventually get to the point where they want something more, and will go out and look for books. But the casual market will just stick to doing 10 mins a day on some free app, and perhaps that is the market that Assimil and other traditional publishers are missing out on now.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby Ruiseñor » Mon Apr 10, 2023 9:39 pm

lavengro wrote:ETA Not to be "that guy" needlessly, but if the "bias" behind a decision to reduce or eliminate production of physical texts in favour of digital texts had been made on the basis of "We cannot afford to incur the environmental impact that physical books involves" ("We" being the planet, the environment, any hope generations after us may have to a reasonable and liveable climate), then (and I know I will not be popular in saying this) I am very strongly in favour. The differential impact on the planet of producing, distributing and ultimately eliminating paper books compared to Jeff Bezos hitting send on a digital book request is very considerable.


commonplaces with little foundation.

What happens perhaps is that they reduce costs and have more margins.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby kennyaa » Wed May 10, 2023 8:58 am

They actually produced a whole new Bulgarian course and pre-orders appeared on sites (cover below), but confirmed on Twitter a while ago that they changed course and decided to release it as an e-course only cause it wouldn't sell enough to break even.

The Hindi course that came out last year was printed so hopefully the model isn't totally dead.

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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby jeffers » Wed May 10, 2023 11:56 am

kennyaa wrote:The Hindi course that came out last year was printed so hopefully the model isn't totally dead.


Sadly they shot themselves in the foot with that course by hiring a voice actor with a lisp.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby willcouchman » Wed May 10, 2023 7:33 pm

jeffers wrote:
kennyaa wrote:The Hindi course that came out last year was printed so hopefully the model isn't totally dead.


Sadly they shot themselves in the foot with that course by hiring a voice actor with a lisp.


I emailed them about that exact issue with some feedback, which they said they sent to the authors. Some time later they got back to me with:

"The native speakers have been selected by the authors, so it is a wish on their part to confront the learners with a diversity of elocution, just like in India."

It's a shame, because the CONTENT of the course is absolutely superb - the best I've ever come across in a beginner's Hindi course - but the audio is almost unusable because the main voice actor's lisp and elocution (he slurs his words together) mean he is at times impossible to understand, even when reading the book at the same time!

I abandoned the course after a couple of weeks for only that reason. Audio is such a critical part of absorbing the language and it was simply too much hard work. I doubt they'll re-record it though.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby zjfict » Fri May 12, 2023 2:02 am

I've been buying some stuff I hope to use in the future. I nabbed "Business French" with the audio CDs on Amazon a couple of months ago for $30. Even though the book has had little use, the binding is so crummy that I'll have to keep a rubber band around it.

My "Spanish with Ease", "Using Spanish" and "French with Ease" books have the nice covers with the red ribbon. Sadly my "Using French" copy is the new fold type cover.

I can't find "Using German" anywhere.

It seems Russian editions with English or Spanish base are all redonkulous wherever you see them. $150+ for just the book.
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby diaconia » Sat May 13, 2023 8:20 pm

The German base seems to be working. I just purchased a used copy of "Russisch Ohne Mühe" Multimedia for 60 euros. I've actually got another program I'm doing for Russian, but at that price I decided I'd better grab Assimil!

The other program I'm using is all digital and has its limitations. It's not easy to print out pages if I want to do the exercises, or study a particular dialog or chapter, and don't feel like powering up a device.

But maybe it's just the English market where they are concentrating their "digital endeavors". If that were the case, then learning a new language through an L2 would be a way to keep the books?
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Re: Assimil phasing out physical books?

Postby kanewai » Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:53 pm

I'm one week in to the Turkish e-course, and I'll give a full review after I've used it for a few weeks. I already had the book, and only needed the recordings - but the e-course was only five euro more than the mp3 download.

So far, it is a significant step up from other digital courses. I like that I can run through the dialogues one sentence at a time; one of my problems with Assimil is that it was a pain to isolate each sentence. And since the exercises are digital it's impossible to "accidently" cheat and let your eyes slip over the answers. It forces you to answer the questions from memory.

I also get bored sometimes with the traditional Assimil method of listening to the dialogues multiple times.

Drawbacks so far - I haven't found a way to listen to one dialogue in it's entirety. Maybe there's a button to do that & I just can't find it. I also like having the physical book to read through the translation in its entirety. The e-book has one go through the dialogues sentence-by-sentence.

I also need to do this on my iPad - I don't like it on my phone.

I'll come back with some screen shots when I have the time. It's probably easier to show than to tell. So far I am enjoying it more than the physical book, despite the drawbacks.
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