Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> 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.
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.
As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
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.
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.
Worst part is there is open source tools that are similar but take effort to setup and host so universities don't use them.
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.
https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology...
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).
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.
I had professors share PDFs of textbooks with the class, and I've been the person to torrent textbooks and provide them to classes full of people.
There are ways around the textbook industry, and the industry is so scummy they really deserve to have their works distributed in a way that doesn't give them any revenue.
This is not what the rent seeking publishers are doing. They are hoarding record profits. Agriculture is a single digit percentage of the workforce.
Despite being top of his field he was a professor, department head, and dean at a state school (University of Illinois). The current department head (according to the Illinois Salary Database) has a total compensation of $177,386.64 annually.
Adjusted for inflation to the last year he as was alive (2010) this would have been roughly $142,000. Considering the level of education, work load, stature, etc this isn't exactly impressive. Being in tech my first position when I was 21 years old I was making more money than his salary at the time (2006 or so).
Additionally, shortly after taking the department head position at UIC they were consistently ranked as a top 3 OT program by US News. His income was supplemented by adjunct professorships around the world, book sales (almost nothing from what I remember), and speaking engagements. More important than income was maintaining stature and standing in the field to if nothing else keep the department ranking. I'm sure there was plenty of pressure from the university on that.
It's not difficult to imagine this is a vicious cycle. Between "publish or perish", the pressure to maintain department and personal standing, etc all of this was essentially part of the game. He was a total package deal across the board.
From what I understand the model he developed is the most widely practiced OT model in the world (to this day). At a certain point I suppose a decision to "get out of the game" and maintain nothing other than his professorship could have very well resulted in losing everything - I don't know that tenure could even have saved him from that.
Even though he made practically no money from book sales more or less "writing the book" in his field was the vehicle that drove the entire thing.
It's not hard to imagine that getting off the treadmill could have resulted in him being relegated as a washed-up has-been to a C-level program somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They make it sound as if thats desirable and that us, the “market”, cant wait to pay pearson more money.
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.
https://www.weforum.org/videos/how-digital-id-codes-on-secon...
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.
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.
At Ralph Lauren, we care about the environment...
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.
In their next editions, I hope the economics textbooks these guys publish use this quote as an example of rent-seeking.
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.
> Single Tier: $9.99 per month for one Pearson eText
These publishing companies are the worst.
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).
If you think that's funny you should check out eightsleep. They have a literal subscription service for a mattress. We went past parody territory and then lapped it.
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.
Meaning, if you give or sell the ebook to someone else.
Yes, anyone should be able to give someone a book for free.
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.
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.
The most popular thing I've written was 27 years ago, so the initial versions would just about be in the public domain now. But the newer versions would still be copyrighted.
Also, I have had trouble finding when some authors died.
Please elaborate.
> Please elaborate.
I think your parent was expressing the inherent tradeoff in Copyright.
On the one hand, the country has a vested interested in allowing citizens to participate in culture. That doesn't just mean consuming, but also modifying and creating using inspiration from other parts of culture.
On the other hand, the country recognizes that the generation of cultural artifacts is greatly increased if creators have limited monopoly rights over their creations so they can more easily make a living creating them.
I'm not sure if I would call it a "moral evil", but I can understand how one could.
Intellectual work takes time and effort only once when it is created. Copying information is so cheap, it is close to zero. Yet, copyright holders accumulate copyrightable material and try to earn money from it in perpetuity. This is the classic case of rent seeking where the concept of ownership is used to take value from the labor of others.
I don't fully agree with this interpretation, but I won't say that I totally disagree either.
Just to clarify: intellectual property does not protect ideas, but the way they are expressed.
You can rewrite an entire book and republish it with your own words. What you cannot is copy the exact same words.
In fact, we know this to be the case because its how publishing used to work pre-Berne Convention. Imagine the mid-90s anime fansubbing scene, except everyone is a for-profit business who is able to obtain copyright over their translations of other people's work. It was incredibly scummy and hostile to artists in ways that would make Jeff Bezos[0] blush.
There's also a related problem of dividing "official" and "unofficial" works in such a way as to be legally airtight. "Noncommercial use" is actually really narrow, because the work itself is a commercial product and its production costs money. Think about how many fan artists have Patreon campaigns these days: sure, you don't have to pay to view their work, but they are still running the same kind of business that the original/official release is using. It's the sort of thing more appropriate for the original creators to just have a blanket "I don't care about people who do X, Y, or Z" policy/license rather than peeling back the legal protections on certain creative jobs in a way that, say, the scumbags at large media conglomerates might figure out how to monetize. Or, in other words, that fanartist with a Patreon is arguably protected from corporate competition by the fact that their work is illegal but practically unprosecuted in a way you can't put into law.
None of this would matter, of course, if copyright terms were limited to a short time period. All of the more onerous copyright rules I mentioned above were far more tolerable in a world where copyright on works people cared about regularly expired. If lawmakers had known that copyright terms would get blown out to life plus a tail period that is basically another life term, they probably would not have allowed derivative works to be controlled in this fashion.
[0] Owner of Amazon, the company that put your local bookstore out of business and then made it incredibly easy to resell other people's books on their platform
These are extreme views. That's fine! But it's why we get crap like Pearson putting NFTs on textbooks. Because reasonable objections get drowned out by fringe opposition.
(Side note: all property is a legal fiction.)
Don't you feel that the writers, coders, and digital artists deserve to have some control over their work too?
Once you share an idea you should have a chance to be compensated for your work, but it enters the collective unconscious and it becomes part of society.
It's like having a child, you can raise it however you like until a certain point, but then it goes out into the world.
And, others have pointed this out, but copyright has nothing to do with ideas. If you want to write your own book with the ideas, go to it.
But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up.
I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.
I can almost tolerate the exorbitant costs of textbooks on the basis of the existence of a vibrant used textbook market. But what keeps me from doing so is the lengths to which the publishers go to stamp out that used market, without any concomitant reductions in price. You want to play the rapidly-coming-out-with-new-editions game, the one-time-use online code game? Fine, I ain't forking out more for your textbook than any other book (that would be $20), and if you're not offering it at that price point, well, the $0 you're getting instead should be sufficient comfort.
Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy
https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/...
https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracti...
New isn't better, old isn't worse.
The fact that you can claim a part of the production without producing yourself is silly (and necessary since we age), but that's how the system work.
Now, the morality of how you do it, wether you are doing that by owning land, owning stuff already made, scamming old people, receiving government pensions or using predatory endeavors to capture money from a captive public, doesn't come from the system. This morality we decide collectively by voting laws an politicians who have a view on the question. There, you can have socialist, liberal or conservative morality (and a few other) to choose what is acceptable or not. For example, conservative are deontologists (in my country) while you have a mix of deontologism and nihilism amongst people on the far right (and far, far left).
All that to say you probably aren't an Uber -capitalist (i had a whole paragraph to explain what it meant to me and that this doesn't exist anymore in developed countries, but i had to go deep and it wasn't that interesting)
And piracy is a good thing. I encourage it and I wish there was more of it to keep these companies in check.
What exactly is your problem with this model?
Seriously - lets have this conversation for real. What is ethically wrong with a model that states "I will create this thing for you if you pay me X up front - then it is a public good"?
Many indie creators are already using this model. It seems like an absolutely fair trade.
---
Further, continuing the conversation how in the fucking fuckitty fuck do you think that model is less ethical than the complete repeal of the right of first sale that these publishers seem to be working towards?
How can you possibly attempt to justify their actions as ANYTHING other than literal rent seeking, at great societal expense?
That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.
The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.
There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.
From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).
Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).
Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
Further, and this is the one that really kills me: Countries/Companies that ignore IP have a serious competitive advantage.
It's not only more ethical, it's also more efficient. It's folly to believe that IP laws will protect you against these motivated actors, and playing the game internally is slowing us down and hampering our own performance.
I also think that digital goods remove any sort of "harm" that can be reasonably expressed from having your sole ownership removed.
If you own a digital book, and I copy it - you are not deprived of your digital book. We both now own it.
It seems to me that a robust model based around funding the creation of new work, rather than the sale of work, is a much more efficient and ethical solution than any sort of government enforced IP.
You don't want to fund the creation, funding the creation is inherently risky. Let the creators bear that risk, they know more than any central governing entity. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated as it accrues month-by-month.
The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.
I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction wherein real money is used. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed - or as I prefer to look at it, the first loser. Vickrey auctions are great because they get the bidder to bid their true value. This gives us good data to determine what a certain product is worth. In this modified Vickrey auction the top 50%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner.
So that would mean that 50% of people get access, and we're turning away 50%. But we can do better than that, as we know from sampling, we don't need to know everyone's values to get a good idea of what something is worth, so we can use sortition to decide if a given user is even going to bid in the first place. So this might mean for a given product you only sample 0.01%, and then only 0.005% go without. That seems rather fair to me. Once we have a value for a product, the next year we might not even have an auction for it, and everyone would get access to it.
And we can do better than that, since the money is being subsidized, and presumably this would result in a more efficient society, the money collected through these auctions need not fund the subsidy. What we can instead do is have the auction results just be given to everyone who opts into the sortition process similar to the carbon price and dividend system. Anyone who uses less than the median amount would see that their time spent valuing products as a net-postive, and anyone who doesn't want to vote doesn't get their cut.
We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. Eventually the pot would grow so large that even private products, wanting a cut of their own, go open source. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.
However, it's fairly limiting if that's the only way copywrite material can be compensated.
For example, I enjoy paying to see a movie that I want to see once it's out and has been reviewed. What I don't want, is to crowd-fund the movies I think I want to watch in 3-5 years from now.
If, once created, copyright becomes public domain how do you see big IP's being funded realistically?
This isn't piracy that we are talking about. This is the publisher wanting to be in on every sale after the initial one. It's a bit like if you wanted to sell your John Deere lawnmower at a yard sale, but John Deere sent out a representative to make sure the company collected 20% of whatever you sold that lawnmower for.
I do not believe that publishers deserve to get paid for anything after the sale. We already have an existing mechanism to prevent the second half of that question from happening: it's called copyright. It is illegal for me to make a copy and distribute that copy, at least for any book published in the last 95 years (and honestly, that period is itself way too long).
That there is a vibrant secondhand market for textbooks in particular is a testament to the failures of publishers to make their retention desirable. I hold no sympathy for them, and I bristle at the notion that they deserve to be recompensed for their mistakes.
do away with copyright and guarantee everyone a decent standard of living.
The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.
For example, digital games also do not have the ability to resell them, but they aren't inherently cheaper to compensate for this. This is because creative works are not priced cost-plus, they are priced by perceived value.
Insamuch as digital textbooks will be cheaper than physical, it will be purely a psychological pricing thing rather than a function of the publisher's expected profit. If that $100 textbook was $90 used, the digital copy will be $85, even though the publisher would still get the same total revenue selling them for $10. They will bank on students not accounting for the used market at the end of the semester lowering their total costs (or students not having extra cashflow to lock up in textbooks).
What would almost certainly happen is the publisher still sells it for $100 initially, and then gets $10 for each of the resales. I mean, look at the effect that ebooks (which skip the costs of printing the textbooks!) had on textbook prices, or, rather, the lack of effect.
The reason textbooks can cost as much as they do is that demand is very inelastic - students don't have any real alternatives to purchasing textbooks (in most cases.) As a result, there's little downward pressure on textbook prices.
Without any reason to lower prices, publishers would absolutely take this opportunity to maximize profits by raising secondhand prices and taking most or all of the difference. Students will be forced to buy them anyway, so why wouldn't they?
This was how copyright worked in Europe until quite recently. A composer was only entitled to the royalties of the first public performance of their work, and after that it was public domain.
You wonder why the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, etc. were such prolific composers: The system was designed that way.
In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further.
Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps:
1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0]
2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could
There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next.
[0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement
[1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.
You mean like all other objects ever made? Cars e.g. are routinely resold and automakers never receive a dime after the first purchase from a dealer. This is the norm.
Why should a rightsholder should retain control of a work throughout its existence? That's what this discussion is really about - Pearson abusing the blockchain to insert themselves into private transactions between third parties. One of the biggest failings of the digital age was not baking "first sale" rights into the system from the beginning. Just like with everything else, adding "on/with/by a computer" to anything seems to be free rent-seeking territory.
The department is basically making students pay extra money so that they can save the cost of a TA to manually grade homework. That's not going to stop unless the students call foul and push back.
Not even DRM scams.
It’s book content packaged in SaaS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> But people buy ebooks because they want to see the content
People buy ebooks because (piracy aside) they have to in order to see the content. I'm not really sure how that's relevant in any way though.
> and they do not want to pay royalties back to Pearson.
Why would people want to pay royalties to an artist, and not to an author? I would actually agree with you, but I think people don't want to pay royalties full stop.
What Pearson is suggesting is a different model: that you have to buy the NFT to see the content. This will lead to piracy, as most people will not be buying the textbooks for the token, but for the file it points to.
> Why would people want to pay royalties to an artist, and not to an author? I would actually agree with you, but I think people don't want to pay royalties full stop.
People usually are happy to pay and see royalties going to content creators, and if Pearson set up the smart contract to split royalties across the dozens of editors and designers that had a hand in making the book it would be a fantastic use of the blockchain. But this article suggests that Pearson as the distributor will be reaping the most rewards, not the authors of the textbooks.
The purchased ebook may never get opened.
A significant amount of piracy is not to avoid paying, it's to get a functional product that I can actually keep backed up and have across all my devices.
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.
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.
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.
Those numbers are roughly comparable to other countries. We're within a percentage point of GDP of Switzerland, Australia, Germany, the UK and more.
The big issue is the number of students has dramatically increased, but funding has not. We either need to spend a lot more (costs would rival and maybe even exceed healthcare), or we need to cut costs.
My personal take is that we need to trim the fat out of the curriculum. A lot of classes have nothing to do with your major, and exist only to make students "well-rounded". I don't see a compelling reason to use public funds to force electrical engineering or CS students to take English composition classes (hell, I had to take Early Childhood Education to fill a gen ed credit). I barely see a reason to force them to take Calc 2; tools exist to give people the answer to those questions, they're just truncated to a value more precise than anyone could manufacture anyways.
I don't have a problem if Math students want to take English classes or vice versa. I just don't think there's enough public good in it to be worth paying for with public money. How many people actually use those skills anyway? I have never in my career been asked to read a document and look for symbolism. I have never been asked about childhood education. I have never been asked a problem that I needed Calc 2 for. I probably could have skipped half my classes and no one would have noticed.
My question is whether it would make a comparable workforce, and to that end I suspect it would.
In my mind, the purpose of the government funding education is a return on investment. They're expecting to get more back than they put in over a long enough time horizon. The goal isn't education for the sake of education, it's to create an educated workforce that can produce higher value goods and services.
We can put public money to better use than education for the sake of it. If people want to learn for the sake of it, they can use the library or YouTube or pay for a teacher.
We've got other problems like people without healthcare or homes, climate crisis, a terrible foster care system, etc. Put the money towards that instead of paying for massive buildings and staff to teach everyone underwater basket-weaving so they're "well-rounded".
Now if only the languages department at this school would realize this. Those textbooks and "CDs" are the most egregiously overpriced materials, and it seems that none of the lecturers in the department want to put in the time to build a course around collaborative learning (group discussion) and the abundance of free materials available online.
TL;DR - thanks for being a goodguy/goodgal professor.
The worst part about a computer science degree is the sheer amount of brand new books they force you to buy since they come with online cd keys for 'additional learning materials' which is really just some scanned workpages, but for some reason it'd be mandatory you log in to this random book's website.
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.
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.
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.
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
NFT hype: Money can finally accrue to artists and creators without getting siphoned by middlemen.
Pearson: Hold my beer.
lol
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.
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.
Library Genesis! screw Pearson --- those books are so pricey anyways....
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).
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.
oh no, I think you just found an achille's heel.
Though I think that's not the intention. Keeping the price same _and_ sucking every secondary-sale comissions is.
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.