> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
At Ralph Lauren, we care about the environment...
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.
They make it sound as if thats desirable and that us, the “market”, cant wait to pay pearson more money.
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.