The news that 46 QR code charging points were set up in the college textbook "Constitutional Law" published by the Higher Education Press, with a total of 138 yuan for each 3 yuan, has been on the hot search in the past two days, triggering heated discussions among netizens.
Those in favor believe that this is the efforts of publishing houses to expand reading, provide value-added services, and crack down on piracy, which is worthy of recognition. Moreover, there is a note at the back of the book that first-time buyers can unlock it for free at no additional cost. Opponents argue that university textbooks, especially constitutional law textbooks, are serious and should not be pursued too much to maximize profits. Moreover, a book can only be bound to one mobile phone number, and second-hand book users must pay to decode, which is not conducive to the circulation of books and is suspected of waste.
Can college textbooks be accompanied by QR codes? Due to the previous occurrence of links to obscene and pornographic websites in the high school Chinese elective textbooks of a publishing house and links to gambling websites in the compulsory textbooks of high school biology 3, the Ministry of Education has issued notices several times, stipulating that all kinds of links and QR codes that provide additional teaching aids shall not appear in primary and secondary school textbooks. However, there are no relevant regulations for college textbooks. It is not illegal to set up a QR code in the "Constitutional Law".
From the perspective of technical standards, in August 2023, the first domestic industry standard on publication QR codes, "Requirements for the Application and Management of Publication QR Codes", was officially implemented, and requirements were put forward for the editing, review, and maintenance of publication QR codes and related content. According to this standard, there have been no reports of violations or errors in the content of the QR code of Constitutional Law.
According to media reports, QR code technology began to be applied in the publishing industry as early as 2006. Today, a large publishing house may have more than a million QR codes. Wang Jian, vice president of East China Normal University Press, once introduced in an interview with the media that the books of China Normal University are basically equipped with QR codes, with more than 100 QR codes for more books and dozens of fewer books. Comparatively, the "Constitutional Law" sets up 46 QR codes, which is not much.
Setting up QR codes in publications involves content review, post-maintenance, layout design, etc., which can be said to increase a lot of workload. The reason why publishing houses are willing to face the "difficulties" is that the combination of paper publications and QR codes not only conforms to the development trend of publishing integration, but also conforms to the current and future knowledge consumption patterns of readers. Secondly, scanning the code and the traffic behind it is an important means for publishers to aggregate users, and it can also bring corresponding value-added services. In addition, through the access data of the QR code, the publishing house can intuitively know the popularity of the publication and the QR code setting point, which can provide reference for subsequent revision and topic selection planning. From this point of view, the establishment of QR codes in "Constitutional Law" is also a reasonable measure to follow the trend of publishing.
However, in addition to the QR code set up in the textbook of "Constitutional Law", it should also be considered reasonable. From the official website of the Higher Education Society, it can be seen that in addition to the intellectual content such as "the change method" and "the 'Rutte case' of the Federal Republic of Germany", the book has turned the self-test exercises in each chapter with high usage rate and high demand into QR code resources. Such bundling sales, so that readers have to pay for knowledge at the same time, it is inevitable to feel uncomfortable and slandered, no wonder some public opinion questions such a practice "innovation or revenue generation"?
In any case, college textbooks are first and foremost a public good with a wide audience, and excessive commerciality will hurt the public goods of the textbooks themselves.
Source: Beijing Daily client
Reporter: Liu Jianghua