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Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands

• satisfice 4y ago
  …unless hackers.
• dtx1 4y ago
  Narrator: it won't
• achenet 4y ago
  It's like academic publishing is literally the most rent-seeking industry in existence.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • techdragon 4y ago
    Amazingly they managed to become more rent seeking than the titular “rental property” industry from which the behaviour is named. Since property rental is usually heavily regulated with a lot of obligations placed on them to support the customer and prevent the renting owners from doing whatever they want with their property.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Aaaand this is why, when teaching a cybersecurity class subbing for a prof on sabbatical, I completely jettisoned their Pearson curriculum for what I could find online, relatively easily.
• rychco 4y ago
  > In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale. > The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life. It almost reads as satire.
  • colpabar 4y ago
    finally, a real world use case for crypto! /s
    • silon42 4y ago
      Yes, for crypto in DRM and locked OSs.
  • mumblemumble 4y ago
    But it's just everyday academic publishing. I used to work at a large and well-known academic publisher, and the main thing I learned at company all hands meetings was that senior leadership had no desire to make money by simply making and selling products that people wanted to buy. They were always much, much more preoccupied with coming up with schemes to compel people to purchase their products.
    • musicale 4y ago
      > But it's just everyday academic publishing Yes it is. Publishers already try to sabotage reuse and resale of their print textbooks by tying them to single-use codes for their digital platform, which they somehow lure instructors into using. Instructor collusion with this is really a sort of professional malpractice that should be banned by the educational institution, but of course institutions are bribed with kickbacks from the publishers. Yet it would be more efficient for the institution just to raise tuition and fees which are charged to students directly.
      • sitkack 4y ago
        > somehow lure instructors into using The publishers offer "free grading" of homework from the textbook, but it is one time use. It really is a bribe to the teachers so they no longer have to grade homework in exchange for the student buying a book at full price that they can't resell. There really should be a class action lawsuit against publishers and schools for this behavior.
    • bambax 4y ago
• daniel-thompson 4y ago
  > The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online. In their next editions, I hope the economics textbooks these guys publish use this quote as an example of rent-seeking.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Probably not the Pearson textbooks though
  • horsawlarway 4y ago
    No fucking joke. We're really entering into a phase where companies seem to be hell bent on extracting as much rent as possible for as little work as possible. Which is the absolute end-game of capitalism if left unchecked and unregulated. Let me guess - Next the book will become a subscription service.
    • PenguinCoder 4y ago
      Next? In some cases, already is. https://plc.pearson.com/en-US/news/introducing-pearson-most-student-and-budget-friendly-college-learning-experience https://plc.pearson.com/en-US/news/introducing-pearson-most-... > Single Tier: $9.99 per month for one Pearson eText
    • magnio 4y ago
      Way ahead of you: https://www.pearson.com/en-us/pearsonplus.html https://www.pearson.com/en-us/pearsonplus.html These publishing companies are the worst.
    • AlanYx 4y ago
      >Let me guess - Next the book will become a subscription service. Pearson is one step ahead of you. Pearson Plus offers "[t]he eTextbook and study tools you need... for only $9.99/mo" (per book, with a 4 month minimum, on up to two devices).
    • 4y ago
• zinekeller 4y ago
  For some reason it seems that the most bonkers statement when it comes to academic publishing is nearly always either from Pearson or RELX (née Reed-Elsevier).
  • hef19898 4y ago
    I am sure this will work just as finr as the do-not-sell-outside-of-India disclaimers on printed books.
• game-of-throws 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
  • zinekeller 4y ago
    Unfortunately, this is a US-centric concept (and since Apple licensed instead of selling music these rights have eroded away). Most countries are in a worse position; with even some countries explicity banned reselling of digital articles. Edit: forgot the EU (which has strengthened protections for consumers), but looking at Asia (I'm looking at Singapore and Japan specifically), it's a disappointment.
    • tpxl 4y ago
      Afaik in the EU you can re-sell software licenses for Windows.
      • bonzini 4y ago
        But producers are not compelled to let you do so. For example, e-books with DRM are impossible to resell (without removing the DRM, of course).
    • rideontime 4y ago
      Not an Apple defender, but music licensing has been around a lot longer than Apple has. https://www.flickr.com/photos/59414209@N00/5072909557/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/59414209@N00/5072909557/
  • thelibrarian 4y ago
    And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  Lol. NFT hype: Money can finally accrue to artists and creators without getting siphoned by middlemen. Pearson: Hold my beer.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    > NFT hype: Money can finally accrue to artists and creators without getting siphoned by middlemen. lol
• frameset 4y ago
  Surely this will just increase ebook piracy.
  • boomboomsubban 4y ago
    I think textbooks are already so hated by consumers that anyone willing to pirate them does.
• 676234e117 4y ago
  I am a NFT proponent and this idea seems very broken. The royalty model is working fine in NFT art world because people are not paying to see the GIF or PNG, it is already free to download it in high resolution. Anybody can right click and share it but nobody cares, if anything it can increase the value to have it replicated and shared. And also because most people buying art are willing to honor the royalty if it goes back to the original creator. But people buy ebooks because they want to see the content, and they do not want to pay royalties back to Pearson. Especially students, they will just circumvent the payment and share the DRM free ebook and find ways of using blockchain contract wrappers to avoid royalties. I do think there is probably a viable model for digital content like ebooks that involves crypto payments but this isn't it.
  • skinnymuch 4y ago
    I thought the NFT market, which is mostly art, plunged 90%+. And of the remaining, a number of them are still wash sales. Is that not the case? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what it means for royalty market to be fine in NFT art world.
    • 676234e117 4y ago
      Sales volume has plunged from its early hype, but daily trades and activity remains higher than ever. In some corners of the market sales and royalties are still generating significant revenue for many artists, where prior to NFTs they did not have many options for monetizing their digital art. Beyond monetization it has also spawned new digital art communities, meetups and conferences, exhibitions and art galleries, magazines and critical publications, and is generally continuing to garner interest within the traditional art world.
    • rewtraw 4y ago
      The NFT market is still doing surprisingly well, especially considering how poorly the traditional markets are performing. I'm sure there are plenty of wash sales, but I know many, many people -- including myself -- that buy and sell NFTs on a daily basis and I don't have much problem finding buyers/sellers, especially with the new NFT liquidity markets.
• influxmoment 4y ago
  Ridiculous theater. It's an ebook. Trading it makes zero sense. It cost nothing to duplicate. NFTs are for zero sum status games. Nothing about this makes sense
  • wmichelin 4y ago
    So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? It's intellectual property, and duplicating it is piracy. Do I judge pirates? No, they're taking risks, and that's their own prerogative. I am all for available and affordable resources, but expecting a book someone else wrote for free is a bit ridiculous.
    • daveguy 4y ago
      "changes hands" Meaning, if you give or sell the ebook to someone else. Yes, anyone should be able to give someone a book for free.
    • HideousKojima 4y ago
      >So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. That being said, I'm pragmatic and realize that copyright (and patents/trademarks/etc.) can be a necessary evil as well, which is why I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. No reason Disney should have exclusive rights to their latest Marvel CGI-fest for longer than someone who discovers a cure for cancer would have exclusive rights to profit from their discovery.
      • baseballdork 4y ago
        > I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. I agree. It should be no longer than a patent duration. Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration and means that works created in your lifetime will practically never enter public domain before you die.
• kofejnik 4y ago
  Just wait till ebooks require a proprietary VR reader which will only unlock your books after a retinal scan
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    A physics driven text book in VR with shitty frustrating pages would be great.
  • Joker_vD 4y ago
    There is still the problem that people can upload the book contents into their brains and hold it there in perpetuity... but I am sure our friends in Big Pharma will be able to devise a consumer safe-ish solution to this problem.
• babl-yc 4y ago
  Couldn't you just sell your wallet credentials instead of the chain transaction?
  • jacknews 4y ago
    lol, yes why not just create a new wallet for each book, and trade the wallets. oh no, I think you just found an achille's heel.
• llaolleh 4y ago
  Oh God no. I hope they pour tons of money to find out people won't buy their shitty NFTs.
  • soco 4y ago
    No worries they will just increase their prices.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  Pearson is a great example of how a single company can have such a profound effect on the accelerating decline of an educational system. If you ask a soda manufacturer if water is good for you expect a point of contention, and with Pearson the same. That which is good for society might not and often is not good for a particular companies bottom line.
• yalogin 4y ago
  Kind of make sense. The only value proposition of NFTs is enforcing ownership. Publishing companies along with movie and audio companies are original purveyors if DRM and copyright laws. It’s logical that they will want to take advantage of it. Feels like NFT and blockchain will end up creating a new motivation to steal content again.
  • bootlooped 4y ago
    I don't even think they can do that. You still need some authority to say "possession of this NFT actually means the person owns this thing". But if you need to have a trusted authority to say that why do you need the blockchain?
    • detaro 4y ago
      > You still need some authority to say "possession of this NFT actually means the person owns this thing" I.e. a license. "We, X, grant the following permissions to people holding our tokens signed by key <keybytes>: ..." published somewhere believable. (same as e.g. a software license is published on the makers website) The authority to do so is granted by copyright laws. Tracking who currently holds the relevant tokens is a very different problem, and that's what a blockchain does in this scenario, and NFT proponents argue is better than having some central service that needs to be trusted (but could go away or misbehave) do it, and better than not having an easy way of tracing to the original issuing of the token, which solves the "how do I know you sold a valid instance of this license"/"does this person claiming to do so actually hold a license". The first part of granting a license is always still boring meat-space law.
• keiferski 4y ago
  It’s interesting how the exact same technology can appear as good or evil depending on whom it benefits. The idea of a publisher making money on “used” ebooks seems rather dystopian, yet the same mechanism is being experimented with in the art world. Currently, the original artist makes nothing when his work is resold years later by dealers or museums.
  • soco 4y ago
    You mean, experimented in the NFT world?
  • nicbou 4y ago
    I'm against both. A sale is a sale. You don't need a cut of a transaction you took no part in. The farmer doesn't get a cut of every dish served. However it appears especially evil here because it affects the unwilling participants of a market. Accessing books is a lot more important than owning art.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  It's ironic that this company is attempting to swindle their customers but in reality is getting swindled by whoever is peddling this bullshit blockchain-based "solution".
• codetrotter 4y ago
  Allow me to play devil's advocate here for a moment. It is a well known fact that publishers of books used in University courses regularly publish updated editions of their books where they will arbitrarily reorganize chapters and subchapters, as well as reordering, removing and replacing exercises. They do this in order to force students to buy a fresh copy of the book so that the publisher can have more money. Some lecturers will go through the effort of supporting multiple editions of the books that are used in the curriculum. But for many lecturers this additional work is a burden that they cannot allow themselves to spend time on, so they end up requiring all students to use the same edition of each book. Thus many students have to buy the newest edition of the book instead of being able to buy the one from last year secondhand. Likewise they are then unable to sell these books to anyone next year when yet another edition of the book is published. Giving the publishers a cut of the resale of books will disincentivize them from the current model where they constantly make bullshit edits to their books. Of course there are changes to books used in education that are actually necessary as information becomes outdated. The meaningful edits still need to happen. I'm talking about ending the bullshit edits. And in fact, once we have the publishers agreeing with resale of ebooks, they could then sell patches/diffs for the books that can be applied. Finally we can have resale of books used in education always. tl;dr: This is actually good for b̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ students.
  • beej71 4y ago
    Dad taught at a community college for 25 years. He got so sick of the book scam he wrote his own and had students buy it from the print shop at cost.
  • cmckn 4y ago
    Theres nothing about tokens on a blockchain that would prevent publishers from running this same “edition” scheme, IIUC. It would just look different.
    • codetrotter 4y ago
      When they have a way of getting paid for resale they will be less incentivised to continue the edition scheme.
• can16358p 4y ago
  If the original price goes down, this actually might be a good idea. Though I think that's not the intention. Keeping the price same _and_ sucking every secondary-sale comissions is.
• Geonode 4y ago
  Professor here- I have simply stopped assigning text books, and I am far from alone. I assign web resources, YouTube videos, and I give out PDFs if absolutely necessary. I've found out that I can summarize on one page what a text book stretched into a chapter.
  • effingwewt 4y ago
    This isn't always allowed. I had an Astronomy professor who was forced to assign textbooks every semester. He got his own textbooks published so the students could print them out. College started charging students to print. Professor- in the best FU yet, used the free faculty printers to print out copies of his books for free and hand them out to students. This was the same year the college removed free parking, and cried poverty and thus unable to pay the professors a living wage (to the point some didn't show up for finals in protest) but the school magically had the $250k (possibly double that- the school kept lying about what was spent) to go to court twice (so 500k minimum) to fight the school having their football championship taken away because they were caught doing illegal af kickbacks to the football players (giving them houses to live in and paying them with fake jobs). College cried it was too broke to pay professors, yet gives administrators raises, and uses college funds to fight a suspension they knew they deserved! Same college had some professors asking questions about funds who were summarily terminated. They are suing tf out of the college and the stepping-down if asshats began pretty damn quick. Fuck college administrations, and what colleges have become.
    • adamc 4y ago
      It's fine to FU the administrations, but at public US institutions, a lot of the problem is declining state support for education. In 1970, the full cost of in-state students at the University of Texas was being paid by the state, IIRC. Today, it's 20% or less. The University does what it can to raise money, but... effectively, poor legislative support is going to put pressure on students (and their families) to pay more for education. I tend to think this needs to be worked out at a national level. If we really want a well-educated populace, we need to find a sustainable way of funding it.
• dogman144 4y ago
  Monetizing the used book market for the original publisher is nonsense.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    s/nonsense/even more vile/
• dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  ... what does the title say?
• pmcl 4y ago
  lol
• misterbishop 4y ago
  It's already bizarre enough that librarys have a DRM check-in/out system on e-readers. If you think I'm gonna buy your NFT book, think again.
• failTide 4y ago
  I definitely wouldn't visit those nasty libgen sites to download thousands of books from the pearson catalog for free, because pearson really cares about knowledge.
• HidyBush 4y ago
  Imagine a world where if you cite a paper on your thesis you have to provide the NFT transaction ID so it can be checked if you acquired the article via the official blockchain
• tengbretson 4y ago
  I hope people take this as an example of why, regardless of who technically owns the ledger, publicly, digitally tokenizing everything would in many ways make life hellish.
• espadrine 4y ago
  What is the mile-high big-picture view of this publication? The CEO was unveiling the interim results; the listeners were business reporters that traders read, and the CEO’s motivation was to increase the share price. Traders don’t always reinvestigate technical claims. Objectively, the claim has poor odds of being achieved, since customers have no incentive to use a system where they lose resale value. Furthermore, the technical underpinning they suggest has scalability issues, miner fees, and purchase latency, all of which disincentivize use. The goal, though, was not to tell the world what they would do with certainty, but instead, this: > Shares rose 10% at 11:12 a.m. in London on Monday
• All4All 4y ago
  The blockchain solves a big problem for distributers: it makes DRM attractive. I don't necessarily see the case for textbooks catching on with consumers easily, but in other industries, like film, having the NFT "collectible" version of the item is attractive to some consumers. Of course the DRM protections could likely be trivially bypassed, but consumers could more easily make back a return on their original purchase after they're done with an item, and for collectibles, could display these purchases for others to see. This incentivizes the consumer to desire the DRM-protected item over the off chain asset. The film industry has already begun to explore this with distribution platforms such as https://vuele.io https://vuele.io . Definitely not in support of it, but it seems a logical way for blockchain tech to be adopted into these industries.
  • upupandup 4y ago
    why do you need a blockchain?
    • rcacho 4y ago
      It's interesting how little this is talked about. In the case of something like Vuele, they don't need to have an external database (the blockchain) for their concept to work. They could allow Vuele accounts to trade ownership of download rights and set up a marketplace for people to buy and sell. But given the option to buy the right to download Zero Contact from some Vuele user or buy the download from the Apple store, why would anyone choose Vuele? I think the bet on NFTs is that enough people will buy into the concept that it will legitimize itself. No one would want to go out of their way to buy movies from Vuele but if NFTs were to become popular enough people may be willing to buy movies from popular NFT marketplaces like Opensea, which they may already be buying other things from. The initial impetus is dependent on people having an innate desire for scarcity. It's not solely about speculation. If you tell people they can be one of twenty people to own the original Vuele copy of Zero Contact there are going to be some buyers.
      • upupandup 4y ago
        answer the question please. why does this require blockchain?
• 0x500x79 4y ago
  In my comment history I stated that in a lot of ways NFTs feel like they were moving towards the old-school DRM. It appears others have caught onto this -- I don't like this movement.
• DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  How "canonical" are these textbooks w.r.t. the courses they're used in? I'm asking because I was fortunate enough that my uni's CS school was textbook-less (yes, we had reading-lists, but those aren't textbooks): any and all required-reading articles were solely distributed as PDFs or plaintext from a decades-old (yet web-accessible!) NFS share that was historically used for this sort-of-thing. (I assume everything was correctly licensed, this was/is a UK redbrick so I assume this was all legit) - other typical textbook content like homework questions (...and solutions) was instead something always credited to the TA (or maybe the prof if you're lucky). Was I alone? Is CS unique is not needing students to have textbooks... let alone textbooks that the publishers argue should expire or be exclusive? In a CS undergrad I know the "actual-coding" course material always changes (e.g. language of instruction, C first vs OOP first vs FP first, etc) so any textbook that covers that will be obsolete overnight - a good uni won't want to be seen teaching obsolete things - and anyway, the current _For Dummies_ book might (and if O'Rielly, then will) end-up as a better learning-resource than any official textbook could ever be - as for the rest of a CS undergrad: CS theory and SE and project management: yes, this is where I expect you'll find textbooks, but in my uni's course all the required material was in that NFS share: so anything like a section from a textbook was all neatly cut-out and in a PDF on that NFS share in a subdirectory for whatever year and course we were on. And then I graduated. And 3 months since then I got my green-card working for a FANGMA (...so I didn't just go to a dodgy uni and they didn't rip me off and I'm legit now? right? I still have imposter syndrome). ...so that's my personal experience: textbooks just weren't necessary for students to buy and maintain and sell-on or re-use as expensive monitor stands. So (and excluding law and medicine), why do so many other universities and courses support a closed and inefficient market based on the exclusivity of knowledge by making their students personally buy specific textbooks for even a single course? (Asking friends and people I know who did go through a textbook-heavy degree (even before single-use book codes) said the campus library would never have enough of the textbook to loan so they'd always have to buy them, but still it was common to end-up only reading a few sections and nothing close to the whole textbook).
• parkingrift 4y ago
  This is hilariously ludicrous. NFT artwork is valuable for the same reasons that physical artwork is valuable. And that is that there is a consensus that something is the "original" and that that "original" piece of art has some value to people who into art. Consider this thought experiment. I make a drawing. It's famous. Everyone wants it. It sells at auction for $5 million. I next invent a machine that makes identical copies in identical style. Absolutely indistinguishable from the original. However, the original has a certificate of authenticity that it is indeed the original. Has the original gone up in value, or down in value? There is nothing stopping me, or anyone else, from making a copy of an NFT. It's trivially easy, and free. The copies are worth nothing without the COA, which is what the blockchain attempts to provide. I find the whole thing hilariously stupid, but I find that to be true of art collection in general. To each their own on what things you want to collect. But with a book who gives a shit whether it's the original book or a copy of the original book? No one. No one is going to pay extra to have an authentic copy of a textbook. No one will care.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  The major problem would be that you could be stuck in a single platform for reading, and everyone needs to be on that platform unless another platform also supports that NFT. It will be a lockin like buying games today on particular platforms but cannot play on others, epic, steam, ps4 etc, but a bit more pain in the ass to use.
• kderbyma 4y ago
  I am so tired....so tired of greedy bloody companies..... Library Genesis! screw Pearson --- those books are so pricey anyways....
• timcavel 4y ago
• black_13 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  Nice little preview of what a world with widespread NFT adoption would look like. Transactions that were traditionally anonymous and between two individuals are now permanently public and have a middlemen collecting their cut. Very empowering.
• DoubleGlazing 4y ago
  My wife is a speech therapist and has to buy in to various diagnostic systems e.g. TILLS, OWLS, CSBS. The publishers go to great lengths to make their particular test the standard in each particular area of speech therapy. Each test kit costs €600+ and she has to keep buying the special forms they issue for doing the tests. These forms are deliberately coloured to make them hard to photocopy. It is quite common for therapists to share and borrow the kits because they are just so expensive. Now one of the tests is going online and the publisher is using IP geolocation as well as 2FA with the registered users phone before the materials (just PDFs of the paper version) can be accessed. Same goes for some of the mobile apps these tests have, there are a lot of hoops to jump through to prove you are the person who owns the kit. And of course the online versions cannot be sold to a new user. Okay, not strictly related to crypto in book sales - but I posted to show just how greedy some of these publishers can be.
• solarkraft 4y ago
  You would never pirate a Pearson NFT-Book!