6 ms·

> 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

by 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
  Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too. As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
  - asimovfan 4y ago
    Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
    - anonymousab 4y ago
      I would assume they need to hand in the book itself for grading/verifying those exercises. Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
      - HarryHirsch 4y ago
        A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook. That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
    - bambax 4y ago
      There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster. Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
- colpabar 4y ago
  There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too. FYI for any current students or parents of students: check the library for textbooks before doing anything else. Even if they don't have it, most universities have a system to check out books from other libraries that are "in network". I learned about this after my freshman year and didn't pay a dime for textbooks the rest of my time in school. bonus crypto complaint: it's really sad to imagine crypto/blockchain tech being used to force students (or anyone) to pay for library books.
  - nradov 4y ago
    One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology-department-founder-william-k-purves/ https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology...
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  My dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this... My childhood was spent with him complaining about pressure from his academic publisher to release "new editions". OT programs around the world would update the syllabus to call for the latest edition even though my dad (the guy writing the book) thought it was ridiculous that he had to essentially re-hash and re-word the same material over and over again. Looking back on it he was really dismayed and demotivated by the whole thing but he understood that's just how things are. According to his Wikipedia page he wrote at least seven editions of his two main works... Academic publishing long-ago addressed the secondary market issue. In terms of the blockchain aspect of this - generally anyone who thinks these existing institutions (up to and including governments) are just going to sit on their hands and forgo revenue "because blockchain" they're not living in reality. If anything (as we see here) blockchain is going to be used to as another tool to boost their revenue (assuming it ever gets any real traction anyway).
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition. I don't think it fooled many people, but on the other hand, people keep wanting to eat. It does feel like there are a lot more productive uses of human work, but that's true for a lot of the economy.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      > people keep wanting to eat This is not what the rent seeking publishers are doing. They are hoarding record profits. Agriculture is a single digit percentage of the workforce. https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
- echelon 4y ago
  The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked. When I was in college, textbook companies started rolling out "online portal codes". For many core classes, the industry sells these codes to submit homework that require a new license each semester, regardless of whether your textbook is new or used. They cost hundreds of dollars apiece, the software sucks, and it doesn't fit with the coursework. It's clearly a grift. I swore back in college that if I ever made it big, I'd hire academics to write textbooks to license under Creative Commons, then push them to state representatives, university presidents, and students. This industry is part of the problem. The other is easily accessible loans with no spending caps, and college admins with no desire to stop growing.
  - anakaine 4y ago
    I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door. Those academics published their own course notes, and printed spiral bound texts on campus with reading included. Able to be purchased for $10 each. They wrote their own presentations. We did have some textbooks, though only for particularly advanced subjects, and those were the sort of texts whose content doesn't change particularly much. The issue with the predatory practices, as you rightly point out, is that some institutions, for whatever intrinsic reasons, are prepared to accept the predatory lock in business practices which disadvantage students and create an exorbitant amount of waste.
yrgulation 4y ago
> > The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market They make it sound as if thats desirable and that us, the “market”, cant wait to pay pearson more money.
willcipriano 4y ago
Come on, he's just being helpful. He just wants to "participate" in the transaction. Don't be exculsionary. I'm sure he doesn't mind if you participate in some of his transactions uninvited.
civilized 4y ago
I just imagine a great deal of smirking and moustache-twisting at an outlandishly large conference room table.
vlunkr 4y ago
College textbooks have been pretty ridiculous for a long time in their quest to stay relevant. At this point though they're facing some big threats: Tons of information freely available on the internet, some of it already structured into a curriculum. Open source textbooks that are free online or cheap in print. E-Books, which are much easier to copy than a textbook, hence the NFT scheme. I guess it's only logical for them to try and survive, but if feels like a losing game for everyone right now.
googlryas 4y ago
Why? It always seemed like a quirk of the physicality of books that authors don't get any kind of compensation when their book is resold to others. I find it very strange that 10 people might have read a book, but only 1 person actually paid the author.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  That's a "quirk" of everything that can be enjoyed without consuming it, right? If I hang a painting on the wall, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests look at it. If I listen to music, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests hear it as well. If I lock my door, whoever made the lock doesn't get paid when my partner doesn't get burgled as well.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Yes, absolutely. The difference between a lock and a book though, is that the lock primarily has some ongoing functional purpose. Generally with books, they are consumed (non-destructively), and then their value is drastically diminished to the owner, leading them to resell them. I get to keep all the great memories of the book that I read even after I sell it, but I probably will not think back to all the times I locked and unlocked my door.
deepdriver 4y ago
Wait until you hear about the World Economic Forum’s plan to put digital ID chips in clothes. From the team behind “you will own nothing and you will be happy,” here comes “you won’t even own the shirt on your back.” Ralph Lauren will participate in the leasing or sale of “your” polo shirt at every stage of its product life. Framed as good for the environment, of course: https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-digital-id-codes-on-secondhand-clothes-help-cut-fashion-waste https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-digital-id-codes-on-secon...
- kbelder 4y ago
  T-Shirt: $0.05 per wear. Dress Shirt: $1.00 per wear. Party Dress: $15.00 per wear. Wedding Dress: $1,500.00 per wear. At Ralph Lauren, we care about the environment...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I would have liked to learn more about this, but it’s a video…
  - schroeding 4y ago
    It's a QR Code in the label that links to a "digital identity" that "lives in the cloud", once you scan it you add data to the "garment's global journey". Main selling point is that the QR code shows the consumer that the product is not faked and the manufacturer what kinds of products are resold, as curious buyers would scan the QR code. Why it would be impossible to just go through a real store with a phone and make copies of a few QR codes that you then print on your fakes en masse, I don't know.
    - anakaine 4y ago
      Because they will use ML on the blockchain to prove single source origin of the cloud. And shareholders will eat it up. Less facetiously, however, shoe culture is a thing with a huge resale market. Clothing and shoe piracy is a thing. I could see them using this as a pitch to overcome some of those issues to try and establish a clothing culture to rival shoe culture.
conanbatt 4y ago
It's how the NFT market works though. It's a different financing model - you might get it way cheaper but every time it passes hands it makes money for the owner. The main issue with this is that what is unique about a record is not the book content, that can still be copied out. If a blockchain future exists to replace IP it will be a different financing model for sure and it wont be this analogous to buying digital books like today .It will be more like super hardcore fans will pay thousands of dollars, and people that don't care much about it will get a free copy.

by rychco 4y ago

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
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too. As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
- asimovfan 4y ago
  Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
  - anonymousab 4y ago
    I would assume they need to hand in the book itself for grading/verifying those exercises. Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
    - HarryHirsch 4y ago
      A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook. That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
  - bambax 4y ago
    There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster. Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
colpabar 4y ago
There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too. FYI for any current students or parents of students: check the library for textbooks before doing anything else. Even if they don't have it, most universities have a system to check out books from other libraries that are "in network". I learned about this after my freshman year and didn't pay a dime for textbooks the rest of my time in school. bonus crypto complaint: it's really sad to imagine crypto/blockchain tech being used to force students (or anyone) to pay for library books.
- nradov 4y ago
  One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology-department-founder-william-k-purves/ https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology...
kkielhofner 4y ago
My dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this... My childhood was spent with him complaining about pressure from his academic publisher to release "new editions". OT programs around the world would update the syllabus to call for the latest edition even though my dad (the guy writing the book) thought it was ridiculous that he had to essentially re-hash and re-word the same material over and over again. Looking back on it he was really dismayed and demotivated by the whole thing but he understood that's just how things are. According to his Wikipedia page he wrote at least seven editions of his two main works... Academic publishing long-ago addressed the secondary market issue. In terms of the blockchain aspect of this - generally anyone who thinks these existing institutions (up to and including governments) are just going to sit on their hands and forgo revenue "because blockchain" they're not living in reality. If anything (as we see here) blockchain is going to be used to as another tool to boost their revenue (assuming it ever gets any real traction anyway).
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition. I don't think it fooled many people, but on the other hand, people keep wanting to eat. It does feel like there are a lot more productive uses of human work, but that's true for a lot of the economy.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    > people keep wanting to eat This is not what the rent seeking publishers are doing. They are hoarding record profits. Agriculture is a single digit percentage of the workforce. https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
echelon 4y ago
The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked. When I was in college, textbook companies started rolling out "online portal codes". For many core classes, the industry sells these codes to submit homework that require a new license each semester, regardless of whether your textbook is new or used. They cost hundreds of dollars apiece, the software sucks, and it doesn't fit with the coursework. It's clearly a grift. I swore back in college that if I ever made it big, I'd hire academics to write textbooks to license under Creative Commons, then push them to state representatives, university presidents, and students. This industry is part of the problem. The other is easily accessible loans with no spending caps, and college admins with no desire to stop growing.
- anakaine 4y ago
  I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door. Those academics published their own course notes, and printed spiral bound texts on campus with reading included. Able to be purchased for $10 each. They wrote their own presentations. We did have some textbooks, though only for particularly advanced subjects, and those were the sort of texts whose content doesn't change particularly much. The issue with the predatory practices, as you rightly point out, is that some institutions, for whatever intrinsic reasons, are prepared to accept the predatory lock in business practices which disadvantage students and create an exorbitant amount of waste.

yrgulation 4y ago

> > The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market They make it sound as if thats desirable and that us, the “market”, cant wait to pay pearson more money.

willcipriano 4y ago

Come on, he's just being helpful. He just wants to "participate" in the transaction. Don't be exculsionary. I'm sure he doesn't mind if you participate in some of his transactions uninvited.

civilized 4y ago

I just imagine a great deal of smirking and moustache-twisting at an outlandishly large conference room table.

vlunkr 4y ago

College textbooks have been pretty ridiculous for a long time in their quest to stay relevant. At this point though they're facing some big threats: Tons of information freely available on the internet, some of it already structured into a curriculum. Open source textbooks that are free online or cheap in print. E-Books, which are much easier to copy than a textbook, hence the NFT scheme. I guess it's only logical for them to try and survive, but if feels like a losing game for everyone right now.

googlryas 4y ago

Why? It always seemed like a quirk of the physicality of books that authors don't get any kind of compensation when their book is resold to others. I find it very strange that 10 people might have read a book, but only 1 person actually paid the author.

Vinnl 4y ago
That's a "quirk" of everything that can be enjoyed without consuming it, right? If I hang a painting on the wall, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests look at it. If I listen to music, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests hear it as well. If I lock my door, whoever made the lock doesn't get paid when my partner doesn't get burgled as well.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely. The difference between a lock and a book though, is that the lock primarily has some ongoing functional purpose. Generally with books, they are consumed (non-destructively), and then their value is drastically diminished to the owner, leading them to resell them. I get to keep all the great memories of the book that I read even after I sell it, but I probably will not think back to all the times I locked and unlocked my door.

deepdriver 4y ago

Wait until you hear about the World Economic Forum’s plan to put digital ID chips in clothes. From the team behind “you will own nothing and you will be happy,” here comes “you won’t even own the shirt on your back.” Ralph Lauren will participate in the leasing or sale of “your” polo shirt at every stage of its product life. Framed as good for the environment, of course: https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-digital-id-codes-on-secondhand-clothes-help-cut-fashion-waste https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-digital-id-codes-on-secon...

kbelder 4y ago
T-Shirt: $0.05 per wear. Dress Shirt: $1.00 per wear. Party Dress: $15.00 per wear. Wedding Dress: $1,500.00 per wear. At Ralph Lauren, we care about the environment...
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I would have liked to learn more about this, but it’s a video…
- schroeding 4y ago
  It's a QR Code in the label that links to a "digital identity" that "lives in the cloud", once you scan it you add data to the "garment's global journey". Main selling point is that the QR code shows the consumer that the product is not faked and the manufacturer what kinds of products are resold, as curious buyers would scan the QR code. Why it would be impossible to just go through a real store with a phone and make copies of a few QR codes that you then print on your fakes en masse, I don't know.
  - anakaine 4y ago
    Because they will use ML on the blockchain to prove single source origin of the cloud. And shareholders will eat it up. Less facetiously, however, shoe culture is a thing with a huge resale market. Clothing and shoe piracy is a thing. I could see them using this as a pitch to overcome some of those issues to try and establish a clothing culture to rival shoe culture.

conanbatt 4y ago

It's how the NFT market works though. It's a different financing model - you might get it way cheaper but every time it passes hands it makes money for the owner. The main issue with this is that what is unique about a record is not the book content, that can still be copied out. If a blockchain future exists to replace IP it will be a different financing model for sure and it wont be this analogous to buying digital books like today .It will be more like super hardcore fans will pay thousands of dollars, and people that don't care much about it will get a free copy.