Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs
from the making-nfts-even-worse dept
Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them — and more such books will get sold every semester that the professor requires it. Therefore, textbook prices are insane by any imaginable standard. And, for decades, they kept getting higher — massively outpacing tons of other goods. For unclear reasons, the never ending march upwards in book pricing finally seemed to hit a ceiling around 2016, and prices seem to have somewhat leveled out since then. This chart from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is really pretty striking:
And, while publishers claim that the shift to digital textbooks (partially accelerating by remote learning during the pandemic) has resulted in a decline in student spending over the last five years, the College Board’s latest estimates are still that students will spend an average of $1240 per year on textbooks and supplies. That’s… a lot.
While there are some considerate professors out there who take into account the cost of textbooks (and a very rare few who will only require open access textbooks), most don’t seem to much care. They assign the books they want, the students are required to buy them, and so the publishers just keep raising the prices. Of course, the other way that students try to save money is by buying used textbooks. The savings are not always that significant, but when you’re talking about such large numbers, it can still make a huge difference.
Pearson, the largest of the Big 5 textbook publishers, also has a longstanding reputation for being particularly evil and uncaring. A decade ago, we wrote about how it had sent a single DMCA notice that resulted in 1.5 million teacher and student blogs being deleted. The company also was a key plaintiff in suing a startup that tried to offer free alternatives to super expensive textbooks (the lawsuit was eventually settled with the startup shifting business models, before it was acquired and its cheaper textbooks were shut down).
But, the most evil thing we’ve seen Pearson do was, back in 2019, when it announced it was so annoyed by the used textbook market digging into its never ending profits, and that it was going to switch all its textbooks to non-resalable digital textbooks. For the books it did print, it was going to try to shift to a rental only system. You pay for the textbook for a semester and then you return it. To Pearson. Who can resell it.
Since then, digital scarcity in the form of NFTs has come and gone as the new hotness. And while I still think there’s something interesting about NFTs (and am still working on a big paper about the pros and cons of NFTs), Pearson, in a manner only it could find reasonable, is embracing NFTs… to fuck over students even more.
The print editions of Pearson’s titles — such as “Fundamentals of Nursing,” which sells new for £57.99 ($70.88) — can be resold several times to other students without making the London-based education group any money. As more textbooks move to digital, CEO Andy Bird wants to change that.
“In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale,” he told reporters following the London-based company’s interim results on Monday, talking about technological opportunities for the company.
“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,” by tracking the material’s unique identifier on the ledger from “owner A to owner B to owner C,” said Bird, a former Disney executive.
I mean, I kinda have to hand it to Mr. Bird, the former Disney exec. Usually, these kinds of execs at least try to hide how fucking evil and greedy they are. Andy Bird doesn’t give a shit.
So, here’s the thing. The power of NFTs to track resales and allow the content creator to participate in later sales is often touted as a benefit of NFTs. But, the reason it’s seen that way is because when done for digital artwork it benefits the artist, who sometimes has to sell their works pretty cheaply upfront.
This, is not that.
This is a company that already has jacked up prices to ridiculous levels on a captive market that is effectively forced to purchase at whatever price the publisher sets — and now wanting to “diminish the secondary market” and to track and take a cut of any future sale.
That’s not the power of blockchains and NFTs. When people talk about the useful aspects of those technologies (to the extent there are useful aspects) it’s to enable greater ownership, not less. It’s to enable greater independence from giant corporations, not more. The reason NFT resale bounties work is because everyone feels that it’s fair, and it creates a seamless way to further compensate an artist who most buyers want to support. Not to funnel more cash to a giant, greedy, evil company that is already sucking students dry.
What Pearson is looking to do is to make everyone hate Pearson that much more.
Filed Under: andy bird, nft, nfts, resale, secondary market, textbooks
Companies: pearson
Comments on “Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs”
It’s incredible that NFTs are so terrible that there is scientific evidence that they are contributing to climate change. Even the Earth hates NFTs.
papermill was paid only once
lumbermill was paid only once
lumberjacks were paid only once
landowner was paid only once
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Yeah, but ISPs are trying to demand that when you stream from Netflix, they get to be paid 3 times. It’s a brave new world, all irony obvious I hope.
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This is like the puppy kicker’s union deciding that they need to break into heaven to kick the ghosts of dead puppies too.
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And the ghosts of the puppies the dead puppies never got to have.
I'm Surprised It Took This Long
Digital scarcity costs pennies to the dollar, I would’ve expected Pearson to have already been doing this for a decade.
These textbook publishing companies just keep getting worse. I thought textbook prices were outrageous in the 1990s when I was an undergrad. Now that I am a faculty member at a university, I made it a point to change the courses I teach to use open-access textbooks for all of them. Students are grateful when you tell them you saved them the cost of the previous textbook, which was anywhere from $60 to $220 each.
The resale market doesn’t last very long for hard print books, either. These publishing companies will reorder chapters and make minimal cosmetic changes and call it a new edition to get full-price again. Most required undergraduate courses, such as math, ancient history, English, etc… have not changed too much over the past few decades to warrant new editions of textbooks every couple of years.
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“These publishing companies will reorder chapters and make minimal cosmetic changes and call it a new edition to get full-price again”
I’ve read that some won’t even sell you a bound book, it’s just loose pages. Add to that DRMed digital files, can there’s hundreds of dollars for cheaply produced material.
But, the narrative is that if you get into debt for college (in a job market where many entry level positions will reject you if you don’t have a degree, let alone experience), then it’s your own fault because it was cheap in the 1970s.
As someone who almost contracted to create a “Classroom in a Book” for Adobe, I can tell you, out of the $60 or so price the end user pays for each book, each author gets about 75¢. For each ebook, about 13¢.
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The poor author trope was created by the publishers finding ways to keep the authors poor, while they lived in luxury,
Okay, Pearson, hear me out: I know you’re sold on this NFT thing, but what if you sold textbooks as AFTs instead? That way, people can resell the books without having to first learn how the blockchain works. Not to mention it doesn’t have as huge an impact on the environment compared to NFTs, and it’s a way to re-capture the market on physical textbooks… It’s a win-win!!
2016 makes sense
In 2015 OERs really started to take off, so 2016 being when profits started to stagnate makes a lot of sense. They haven’t replaced traditional textbooks yet, but a lot of classes in universities in Canada have been shifting over to OERs. So much so that there are entire post secondary programs that are being marketed as “Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Programs” which are beginning to end OER and other free options.
I still think Wiley & Sons are the worst
As evil as Pearson is, I still think John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is morally the worst publisher. Here’s why:
1. They sued Supap Kirtsaeng for having the temerity to sell their books overseas. The case made it to the Supreme Court, and had it gone the other way, we would need permission from © owners to fucking sell stuff or give stuff away. I think we really dodged a nuclear bullet there.
2. They’re a party of a group of litigators suing the internet archive for Controlled Digital Lending during a pandemic when libraries were closed. They’re so zealously adamant and intransigent about their copyright that they’d burn the digital library of Alexandria to do so.
So seriously, fuck John Wiley and/or his sons.
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They sued Supap Kirtsaeng for having the temerity to sell their books overseas. The case made it to the Supreme Court, and had it gone the other way, we would need permission from © owners to fucking sell stuff or give stuff away. I think we really dodged a nuclear bullet there.
If that case was being heard today, it might go the other way. The current SCOTUS seems very friendly to the wrong people, up to and including overturning established law, as we’ve already seen this year. SCOTUS: “The first sale principle? Nothing about it in the US Constitution.”
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You know, that whole thing about selling books overseas, and all reminds me that America is today supposed to be in some sort of Great Power competition with the usual suspects.
Now one of the features of Great Power competition is deciding the undecided in your favor. And a major aspect of decided the undecided in your favor is letting them get some of the goodies in your goody-bag. Letting them bask in the glory of associating with you, and in the wealth that goes with it.
Lock away that goody-bag, and pretty soon everybody thinks you’re a skin-flint, and even worse, skint yourself, and so you don’t have anything new to offer. And not surprisingly, pretty soon you don’t have anything new to offer, and you’re out of the Great Game.
(Of course, to understand my point, you need to read history, and I think the dopes in the Supreme Court are not that literate.
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I’m not so sure. One of the judges ruling in favor of Wiley was Ruth Bader Ginsburgh, and she got replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, and I haven’t seen any copyright-friendly (or -unfriendly, to be fair) rulings from her. Same with Antonin Scalia being replaced with Neil Gorsuch. The SCOTUS is hard to predict when it comes to ©.
Seems like we will just have password sharing again
What prevents someone from just selling the credentials to the wallet containing the Textbook NFT and bypassing the Pearson cut. Sure you are going to have to manage a lot of 1 textbook wallets but seems like a easy workaround
NOT thought out
So how to control a Digital copy?
Make your Own device with time date stamps?
MAke a proprietary program for every device that can be used to display the DATA.
Build a program that has all the Data Built in, and the program expires.
Well, lets just copy the Whole txt page by page and distribute it other wise.
Re: True..
Back in the day when we wanted to copy a book, we had to copy page by page in a photo copier, which was tedious and could be expensive.
These days, all one has to do to bypass all of this DRM/NFT crap is take pictures of each page with their phone, then use a program to convert it to a pdf.
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Photo to pdf?
That’s so 20 years ago.
Any kid with a modicum of savy and isn’t a lazy putz would enable the text recognition function of the image.
The only part that takes effort is verification and the indexing.
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You forgot correction of the OCR output. So many times I’ve had to engage in an hour’s editing because the OCR process isn’t perfect.
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With all the equally tedious page turning and lining up to take the photos.
Non Functional Textbooks
What the hell are you studying at such a low price? I’ve looked at book prices of $1200 for a single book!
In computer sciences a singe book average is around $400!
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$400? You can get that particular textbook much cheaper here.
NFTs and ownership
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dislike and distrust a lot of NFT/Blockchain stuff.
Sure in theory having the token means you own the thing, but in reality the same giant corps as always are the ones making the token and they can just use it to stack the deck even harder in their favor.
Why would Pearson, or any other corp, build in a system that loses them profits? Of course they’ll use it to screw over consumers instead.
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It’s a greater fool scam.
For some strange reason
this makes me feel … a lot less guilty.
Whatever it is I’ve done wrong in my life, I haven’t stooped to shafting my own customers.
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You do have a point, I may be a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, bloodsucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-assed, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit but at least I am not Pearson CEO Andy Bird.
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John Hughes called. He wants his Angels with Dirty Faces script back.
You’re welcome, Mike; I suggested this story on last weeks Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt since the link
https://www.techdirt.com/submitstory/
does not work. Any news on this?