Textbook NFT's

NFT's in textbook form..

August 15, 2022

Hello!

Had a ton of things going on last week (family visits, work etc) so I wasn’t able to get one of these out last week, BUT it’s meant I’ve had more time to think about this topic.

When I went to university (or ‘college’ for my friends across the Atlantic), I wasn’t warned about the burden of buying expensive textbooks for a semester’s worth of classes that I’ll likely never open again.

In the spirit of this web3-focused newsletter (and bringing in the web3 twist), some education publishers, namely Pearson, are now looking into selling textbooks as NFT’s to benefit from secondary sales.

I’m going to talk about:

  • Pearson’s plan to get a cut of secondary sales

  • How this will work

  • The challenges

Let’s get to it!

📘 The plan for NFT Textbooks

Textbook publisher Pearson is thinking of using blockchain tech to take a cut of secondary textbook sales.

Y’know how you go through a semester or the academic year, and by the end you have a bunch of textbooks leftover. You might:

A.) Sell them to another student you know who’s a year below

B.) Put it on Facebook marketplace or a similar platform

C.) Burn them 🔥…(not saying this is what I did for some of them but…)

But the problem with any of the above, is that the textbook publishers lose out. Mind, not that they’ve got much to complain about, textbook prices have been on a steady incline since 1970:

Why textbooks cost so much | The Economist

So, to not lose out their piece of the pie, they want in on the action.

Pearson’s CEO, Andy Bird, believes that NFTs coud provide textbook providers a way to become a part of the resale process. As NFTs collect royalties, this would be a secondary form of revenue, contrary to their current single-sale model.

Bird stated:

“In the analog 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.”

Seven times?! I think that says more for a lack of an updated curriculum, but we’ll put the future of education debate to one side…

So, how would this work?

Firstly, this would be a whole new level in the publishing war.

This is the case because of one primary reason - the first-sale doctrine.

This is a legal doctrine that states that physical book buyers own the media they’ve purchased outright, and they’re allowed to sell it without the original publishers making money.

However, digital copies are different - any digital transfer creates a new ‘copy’ of the work, so third-party secondhand ebook sales have faced serious legal challenges as a result.

Firstly, a blockchain allows a decentralized database to operate. I would bet the house that Pearson wouldn’t do this, but could extend an existing copy protection scheme to stop non-NFT owners from pirating its books.

What are the challenges with this?

There are many.

Firstly, NFT’s don’t exactly control who can see a specific piece of work - only who ‘owns’ the token (and even that can be confusing).

The point that took up the biggest headspace for me - Is this just another way for corporations to get every little cent out of consumers? I think we can all guess a publisher-controlled resale market will almost certainly be tilted to favor the publisher.

Is this healthy for the free market? Pearson has not released any concrete plans. But, the main idea is that trackable codes will be inserted into the books that they distribute. Is this what we, as a community, want for the future of NFTs? 

Or do we want a free market economy where we can sell as we please? That’s the real question when analyzing and positioning for the future of Web3.

💬 One Quote

Procrastination, in contrast to other forms of delay, is that voluntary and quite deliberate turning away from an intended action even when we know we could act on our intention right now. There is nothing preventing us from acting in a timely manner except our own reluctance to act.

- Timothy A. Pychyl

📚 Interesting Articles of the Week

Came across this video on LinkedIn of a team using a Lego car to demonstrate agile principles - they do this beautifully. Highly recommend this short watch - it’s at 45m views in 7 months!

A delicate balance between stating the bull and bear cases for crypto/web3, but the author balances both arguments extremely well. I’m more on the bull side and agree with a lot of the points in this post.

The storytelling framework laid out is something I’ve seen some of the top creators use as their playbook time and time again. The point of the post is to describe how today’s trending YouTube comment brings us back to the nostalgic reality TV / gameshows we grew up on as children, but with a fresh twist.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

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Fahim