College textbook maker Pearson eyes NFTs to claim a cut of second-hand sales
this week. “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."Students often have to spend hundreds of dollars on required materials each semester — or even hundreds of dollars on a single textbook. Selling on a textbook when it's no longer needed just makes sense.
Turning textbooks into NFTs and banking on the blockchain to track ownership of them seems unnecessary, though. Digital rights management already exists and doesn't need to go anywhere near cryptocurrency. Pearson has a $15 per month subscription service for its textbooks as well. Bird could simply be bloviating about a zeitgeisty technology to try and keep Pearson's investors happy — even though NFT sales havethis year. In any case, there's still not much he or Pearson could do to stop students from screenshotting every page of a textbook before selling it on.
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