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https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/05/absolutely-terrible-textbook-publishing-giant-pearson-wants-to-make-everything-even-worse-with-nfts/>
"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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
