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Suggestion for new forum about IB textbooks


bigbangfan

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Hey IB survival people. I am an IB graduate from Nov. 2010 and I would like to propose the creation of a new forum that reviews all of the textbooks for IB courses. I believe it will be a great tool for users, as the amount of publishers of IB textbooks is really growing. So, basically my idea is a separate forum that reviews the IB textbooks, you know course companions, pearson´s, study guides, osc revision guides, among others. I think that users need to know the features of the different IB publishers. This would help a lot in avoiding the purchase of wrong textbooks as well as the disillusionment of several publishers. Can some moderator or administrator tell me if this idea can be developed? I can help you guys build the forum!! Greetings to all IBers.

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I totally, totally support this idea. Especially since my school doesn't provide IB textbooks save for physics (which I'm not doing for IB anways), I have to search around for reviews on the IB books I'm planning to buy. Most of the times the reviews I find are just "Awesome!" or other really short, vague phrases. I'd love to see a forum with detailed reviews and opinions about IB books =).

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I think we actually have some threads discussing textbooks in the subjects' respective forums. Some of those are pinned, I believe. But maybe we did not really write 'reviews', just some vague opinions on the books. I do not have the right to decide whether to create the textbook forum, though.

We do have some notes or summaries in the Files section. Unfortunately those are accessible by VIP members and VIP subscribers only :)

We can wait until any of the admins come and read this, though. Good idea. Thank you!

And @bigbangfan you can help build the forum? In what way? I guess we may need some help with that kind of stuff.

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It's not a bad idea and I can understand the appeal it but we're also a bit reluctant to make too many forums that will not have enough topics to fill it. Realistically, each subject would have around 2-3 textbooks that you would consider (at most) and a course guide and whatnot. I just don't think that would be enough threads to fill an entire new forum just on textbooks.

Usually the need for a new separate forum become obvious when the threads on that particular topic gets so numerous that we can't keep track of them and we need to make a new place to put it all in. At the moment I don't see that problem with the textbook threads yet.

I think when you're discussing textbooks, it's probably better if you compare them to each other. Right now, as Desy said, in the individual subject forums there are already threads comparing the relevant textbooks and I'm sure you can already get an idea of their quality from there.

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I think it's a great idea, but it doesn't need to be a forum.

It could be just a page where you can comment and add a review which needs to be approved by an moderator before it publishes. In that way we can make sure we don't have 500 reviews that all say "great book, deffo recommend it"

I think we need to discus this with Graeme on how feasible it is.

But ya definitely great idea!

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Okay. I get your point, but its sometimes kind of messy to look for textbooks review in a specific subject forum, as several threads are old dated and short. Plus, there are more and more IB textbooks coming this year, and from new publishers. I thought it would be a good idea and it would be handy for people who are disappointed by several textbooks for IB, such as my case, if I knew pearson baccalaureate textbooks earlier I would have order them initially and wouldn´t waste money in other textbooks. This is the current list of IB textbooks publishers which is growing a lot:

*Oxford Course Companions

*Oxford Study Guides

*IBID (An Australian publisher which is not well known, and is great!)

*Pearson Baccalaureate

*OSC Revision Guides

*Hease & Harris

*Cambridge (which is coming up with millions of new textbooks)

Well, here you have 7 different publishers and all of them publish textbooks for almost all subjects (except H&H). My suggestion is to make a whole forum that discusses the pros and cons of each publisher in different threads. I hope you guys get to read my post!! Seriously, I find this idea really helpful for IB students and I think that putting IB textbooks reviews in a different forum makes the other subjects specific forums have more subject specific threads. Plus, I think that more importance will be placed on the reviews of textbooks by placing them in a separate forum, and more responses can be given, as sometimes people post many threads for example in Biology forum and a previous thread gets lost, meaning that no one answers it cause there are constant new threads. I hope you understand my point! And thanks for listening!! IBS Rocks!

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Definitely a great idea. Rather than having a dedicated forum, I think it would be better to have a dedicated page for it which can be navigated to from the header. That page will have links to sub-pages for each subject in each group. In these sub-pages, all the textbooks for that subject are listed, and we have the ability to add another book. Every page for a book would have a picture of the cover of the book and a main review written by the user who submitted it. People can comment on the book in the comment section, which will be available for each book.

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Graeme, you probably already know this, but just in case you don't,

Wordpress (or drupal or joomla, I think) would work quite well to provide both a reviewing section and a buy/sell type section as i'm pretty sure there are modifications available for all three CMS's that will allow that functionality. Also, I'm pretty sure they have modifications to allow integration with IPB :austin:

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Hey IB Survivors!! I am writing again to insist on the IB Textbooks review page for each subject. Mark as helpful this post, so as to show the administrators the huge necessity of this new forum or page, whatever the admins want it to be. THANKS A LOT!! :)

Yeah, we understand that it will be useful. We just need to work out the best way to do it. I'll let you know as soon as I've worked out the best strategy. Cheers! :P

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