Postby Speakeasy » Sun Mar 17, 2019 8:06 pm
The complaint of low-quality Linguaphone textbooks is a recurring theme on this forum. For the greater part of its existence, this publisher provided high-quality, hard-bound textbooks, which were printed in clear, easily-readable fonts on heavy stock paper. While packaging varied over the years, generally speaking, the storage cases were both durable and attractive.
While Elexi would have more details on the company’s history, I am under the impression that the company experienced severe financial difficulties at some point and that it changed hands. It may be that the restructuring by the new owners ultimately led to a decline in the quality of both the printed materials and the storage containers for these courses.
It would appear that the constant pressures to reduce costs for an aging product, which was facing serious competition from more up-to-date language courses by other publishers, induced the owners to cease the practice of providing the high-quality textbooks and storage cases about a decade ago and, in their place, include lower-cost, low-quality, soft-bound reprints of the originals (the fonts of which seem to have suffered in the transition), shipped in the unattractive, flimsy, plastic cases. While the company’s “standard pricing” for these courses continues at around 400 $US, for all practical purposes, the “effective pricing” is now about half that.
I do not foresee an improvement in the present situation. Most publishers of language-learning materials abandoned the printing of hard-bound textbooks a few decades ago and the market seems to have adjusted to this practice. The courses themselves, with rare exception, date from the 1970’s. While they would benefit from a complete revision of the texts and audio recordings, this would mean that Linguaphone would have to completely rebuild its catalogue of language courses. Doing so would be a very costly endeavour for which the return on investment would be highly uncertain. Ultimately, apart from the language schools, most of which offer English courses, Linguaphone’s fate may resemble that of Cortina and so many other once-great publishers.
The present situation may explain, to a partial extent, the continued market for vintage copies of the Linguaphone courses. That is, some people simply purchase an older edition of their desired course and either digitize the vinyl records or audio cassettes or acquire the recordings elsewhere.
0 x