> In the analogue 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.
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 dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this...
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 went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition.
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.
There is a downside to the alternative. My Discrete Math 2 course syllabus listed a book out of print since the 80s. The only way to get a copy of the book would have been on ebay for old copies for hundreds of dollars. Thankfully we didn't use it in the actual class.
Yeah, the issue there is copyright, otherwise it would be trivial to reprint it in some form or other. Obviously the solution is open source texts for elementary to intro college level textbooks, and I can't imagine any real argument to that by anyone who isn't affiliated with a publisher.
Forgoing the copyright debate, if the book isn't like a Gutenberg Bible or something then an owner could always unbind it, send it through a scanner, and share a pdf. I've also seen instructions on building a DIY book scanner that's a lot more labor intensive but does not require damaging the book.
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.
Thanks for sharing - I"m curious why he couldn't have declined to write a new edition? What were the incentives such that he felt compelled to play this game? Were royalties time limited or do they just present an ultimatum to rewrite or they'll find the next up-and-coming gunner to write a new version?
If he were still alive he would definitely be retired by now and I'm sure I could ask him. With that some conjecture on my part...
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.
There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too.
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.
One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy.
The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked.
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.
I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door.
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.
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too.
As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook.
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.
There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster.
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.
Back in the day, it cost $0.05-0.10 a copy at the student library, sometimes even free, if you knew the guy/gal working that day. I suppose with the internet being in the palm of your hand, there’s less reasons to be in the library, but back in the day, you’d be in the library 2-3 times a week.
Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
A looot of universities use online homework tools from the big textbook publishers especially for first year classes. Each new book has a code the students can use to access the homework included. Buy a used book and you now need $80 or whatever code often making it more than the new book.
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.
Wait until you hear about the World Economic Forum’s plan to put digital ID chips in clothes. From the team behind “you will own nothing and you will be happy,” here comes “you won’t even own the shirt on your back.” Ralph Lauren will participate in the leasing or sale of “your” polo shirt at every stage of its product life. Framed as good for the environment, of course:
It's a QR Code in the label that links to a "digital identity" that "lives in the cloud", once you scan it you add data to the "garment's global journey". Main selling point is that the QR code shows the consumer that the product is not faked and the manufacturer what kinds of products are resold, as curious buyers would scan the QR code.
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.
Because they will use ML on the blockchain to prove single source origin of the cloud. And shareholders will eat it up.
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.
Why? It always seemed like a quirk of the physicality of books that authors don't get any kind of compensation when their book is resold to others. I find it very strange that 10 people might have read a book, but only 1 person actually paid the author.
That's a "quirk" of everything that can be enjoyed without consuming it, right? If I hang a painting on the wall, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests look at it. If I listen to music, the artist doesn't get paid when my guests hear it as well. If I lock my door, whoever made the lock doesn't get paid when my partner doesn't get burgled as well.
Yes, absolutely. The difference between a lock and a book though, is that the lock primarily has some ongoing functional purpose. Generally with books, they are consumed (non-destructively), and then their value is drastically diminished to the owner, leading them to resell them. I get to keep all the great memories of the book that I read even after I sell it, but I probably will not think back to all the times I locked and unlocked my door.
Come on, he's just being helpful. He just wants to "participate" in the transaction. Don't be exculsionary. I'm sure he doesn't mind if you participate in some of his transactions uninvited.
It's how the NFT market works though. It's a different financing model - you might get it way cheaper but every time it passes hands it makes money for the owner.
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.
> The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.
In their next editions, I hope the economics textbooks these guys publish use this quote as an example of rent-seeking.
>Let me guess - Next the book will become a subscription service.
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.
>Let me guess - Next the book will become a subscription service.
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).
Ridiculous theater. It's an ebook. Trading it makes zero sense. It cost nothing to duplicate. NFTs are for zero sum status games. Nothing about this makes sense
If the online exercises are tied to the ebook, then they can justify “trading” old versions of textbooks by revoking access for the former owner. This is a super shady practice and I hope this doesn’t become a reality.
Students should really band together and start pressuring their universities to ban professors from participating in these practices.
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.
So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
>So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so.
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.
I could go for some scheme where the first 10 years are free, and then you have to register for $x where x is a value that doubles every year. That allows the big IPs to get roughly what they want for commercially viable stuff, but also means that 99% of stuff will drop out of copyright quickly.
The original term in the US was 14 years with one optional 14-year renewal. That sounds good to me.
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.
I tend to think more along the lines of sequel rights. The copyrighted idea is not the exact same words, but the idea of the universe of Star Wars. I think we would live in a world of superior creativity if making money off derivative works made without permission was legal. (Probably those works should be required to say “unofficial” on them or something along those lines)
I have a... partial counter-argument to this. Publishers would absolutely jump at the chance to screw over individual authors with "unofficial" derivative works.
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
> Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas.
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.
I'd like it that if a work has been out of print for more than 10 years then its copyright should expire, regardless of the remaining copyright duration. Let them have their 100+ year copyright, but its forfeit if they don't bother to keep it in print. Let somebody else print it if you can't be bothered.
Not the GP, but the argument could be summarized as:
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.
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.
Copyright is the only way that digital workers can be paid. To put a lefty spin on it, copyright is just a form of union that allows digital workers to keep control of their work. Regular property laws protect artisans and craftspeople who work with physical things from having their work stolen so they can earn a living.
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.
Sure it is for life-- and longer. If a carpenter builds a house, that house is the carpenter's forever. He/she can pass it on to their heirs and those can pass it onto their heirs. The same goes for all physical goods.
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.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
The side-effect of this kind of attitude is that the purchaser must capitalize the whole price of a book or work. Right now, if a student buys a textbook, the student pays full price and then recoups some later by reselling it.
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).
On the contrary, there's no reason to believe the exorbitant initial cost would change at all. If anything, this would make it worse.
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?
There are plenty of reasons to believe it. Publishers are already "renting" printed textbooks to students for a term for a dramatically lower price. I'm sure they would love to do the same with digital copies.
> 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.
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.
But this is already not happening. Textbook publishers are already giving students a choice to either buy a textbook outright or "rent" it for dramatically lower. This is already happening with physical books. I'm sure the publishers (at least some of them) would love to come up with some similar scheme with digital books.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
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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?
at the root of this is the question of ownership. Digital goods have a questionable concept of ownership vs access through rental fees. If i buy a book, it is mine and i can do with it what i please.
That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.
No disagreement from me - I think digital goods lay bare the dirty secret that "ownership" is a social norm, not any sort of real truth.
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.
Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives to actually create anything, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership.
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.
The concept only makes sense for physical objects.
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.
> 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.
There's nothing wrong with payment for creating public domain work. As you said, this can be done today.
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?
Making additional copies / replicas to pass around? No that shouldn't be free. Taking something I've paid for and giving or selling my copy to someone else? Yes should be free
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
No, they just think publishers only deserve to get paid for copies, not licenses.
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.
As a freshman, I had to buy a calculus textbook. Now, this was introductory calculus, pretty much the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented and nothing else. It's been the same for centuries.
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.
Yeah, predatory practices like these remove all sense of remorse I have when borrowing a PDF from someone else's hard drive. No one should respect companies and institutions that are just out to shaft everyone.
To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today.
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.
My counter argument is that the pedagogy is primarily with the teachers/professors and the lessons themselves. Granted, the textbooks do contain information about how to go about solving the problems. But in my experience the textbooks primarily functioned as a repository of to-do math problems. Given that math problems cannot be copyrighted, I really feel like most of these textbooks have content for the sake of making the book intellectual property and such fluff is ignored by most classes.
> I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today.
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.
Money is supposed to represent production (agricultural, industrial and services) and it's usage is a way we invented to share a country production between the participants.
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)
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.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
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.
Unfortunately, this is a US-centric concept (and since Apple licensed instead of selling music these rights have eroded away). Most countries are in a worse position; with even some countries explicity banned reselling of digital articles.
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.
I am a NFT proponent and this idea seems very broken.
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.
I thought the NFT market, which is mostly art, plunged 90%+. And of the remaining, a number of them are still wash sales. Is that not the case? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what it means for royalty market to be fine in NFT art world.
Sales volume has plunged from its early hype, but daily trades and activity remains higher than ever. In some corners of the market sales and royalties are still generating significant revenue for many artists, where prior to NFTs they did not have many options for monetizing their digital art.
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.
The NFT market is still doing surprisingly well, especially considering how poorly the traditional markets are performing.
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.
I'm not really sure I understand what distinction you're making.
> 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.
I do this funny thing where I buy an ebook and then turn around and.. uh.. "acquire" a copy of the same book.
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.
Ditto. I own a great many movies on physical media, and then have digital pirated copies that I actually watch. These digital copies are much easier to store, can be viewed on pretty much any device with no hassle or setup, and are easy to share with friends and family without depriving myself of my own copy. I already paid for a copy of the films once (sometimes twice!) so I don't feel particularly guilty about downloading copies for more practical use. If they want me to stop doing this they should provide a better service.
With a NFT of a GIF, you don't need to pay to see the content. People are not buying these tokens to see the content, because it is free for everybody to see.
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.
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.
It's fine to FU the administrations, but at public US institutions, a lot of the problem is declining state support for education. In 1970, the full cost of in-state students at the University of Texas was being paid by the state, IIRC. Today, it's 20% or less. The University does what it can to raise money, but... effectively, poor legislative support is going to put pressure on students (and their families) to pay more for education.
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.
1970 was a local maxima, probably due to the draft and GI bill. We still spend more as a function of GDP; 1973 was 5.7% of GDP, 2017 was 6.8% (2009 was max at 7.5%).
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.
I don't think that would deliver a comparable education. Speaking as someone who majored in math, got a doctorate in anthropology, and later became a software engineer.
I agree with that, but a comparable education is explicitly not a goal of mine.
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".
As a part-time returning student at a community college - who's really just taking advantage of their fantastic advanced manufacturing facilities - most every teacher in this department subscribes to this approach. YouTube channels such as NYCCNC, Blondihacks, Weld.com, Titans of CNC, The Engineering Mindset, and others provide far superior material over any textbook, and the lecturers realize that any textbook they're obligated to assign just cannot keep up with the pace of innovation from the creator community. As such, "textbook sharing" is implicitly encouraged here, and the one or two students per class who actually buy the printed books are the butt of most of our jokes throughout the semester.
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.
I'm so glad more professors are fighting this, especially at community colleges which are supposed to help those without means, not rent-seek them to financial death.
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.
Amazingly they managed to become more rent seeking than the titular “rental property” industry from which the behaviour is named. Since property rental is usually heavily regulated with a lot of obligations placed on them to support the customer and prevent the renting owners from doing whatever they want with their property.
For some reason it seems that the most bonkers statement when it comes to academic publishing is nearly always either from Pearson or RELX (née Reed-Elsevier).
Aaaand this is why, when teaching a cybersecurity class subbing for a prof on sabbatical, I completely jettisoned their Pearson curriculum for what I could find online, relatively easily.
It's ironic that this company is attempting to swindle their customers but in reality is getting swindled by whoever is peddling this bullshit blockchain-based "solution".
This is hilariously ludicrous. NFT artwork is valuable for the same reasons that physical artwork is valuable. And that is that there is a consensus that something is the "original" and that that "original" piece of art has some value to people who into art.
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.
My wife is a speech therapist and has to buy in to various diagnostic systems e.g. TILLS, OWLS, CSBS. The publishers go to great lengths to make their particular test the standard in each particular area of speech therapy.
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.
Kind of make sense. The only value proposition of NFTs is enforcing ownership. Publishing companies along with movie and audio companies are original purveyors if DRM and copyright laws. It’s logical that they will want to take advantage of it. Feels like NFT and blockchain will end up creating a new motivation to steal content again.
I don't even think they can do that. You still need some authority to say "possession of this NFT actually means the person owns this thing". But if you need to have a trusted authority to say that why do you need the blockchain?
> You still need some authority to say "possession of this NFT actually means the person owns this thing"
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.
Nice little preview of what a world with widespread NFT adoption would look like. Transactions that were traditionally anonymous and between two individuals are now permanently public and have a middlemen collecting their cut. Very empowering.
What is the mile-high big-picture view of this publication?
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
In my comment history I stated that in a lot of ways NFTs feel like they were moving towards the old-school DRM. It appears others have caught onto this -- I don't like this movement.
I definitely wouldn't visit those nasty libgen sites to download thousands of books from the pearson catalog for free, because pearson really cares about knowledge.
It’s interesting how the exact same technology can appear as good or evil depending on whom it benefits. The idea of a publisher making money on “used” ebooks seems rather dystopian, yet the same mechanism is being experimented with in the art world. Currently, the original artist makes nothing when his work is resold years later by dealers or museums.
I'm against both. A sale is a sale. You don't need a cut of a transaction you took no part in. The farmer doesn't get a cut of every dish served.
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.
Pearson is a great example of how a single company can have such a profound effect on the accelerating decline of an educational system.
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.
The major problem would be that you could be stuck in a single platform for reading, and everyone needs to be on that platform unless another platform also supports that NFT. It will be a lockin like buying games today on particular platforms but cannot play on others, epic, steam, ps4 etc, but a bit more pain in the ass to use.
How "canonical" are these textbooks w.r.t. the courses they're used in?
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).
The blockchain solves a big problem for distributers: it makes DRM attractive. I don't necessarily see the case for textbooks catching on with consumers easily, but in other industries, like film, having the NFT "collectible" version of the item is attractive to some consumers. Of course the DRM protections could likely be trivially bypassed, but consumers could more easily make back a return on their original purchase after they're done with an item, and for collectibles, could display these purchases for others to see. This incentivizes the consumer to desire the DRM-protected item over the off chain asset. The film industry has already begun to explore this with distribution platforms such as https://vuele.io . Definitely not in support of it, but it seems a logical way for blockchain tech to be adopted into these industries.
It's interesting how little this is talked about. In the case of something like Vuele, they don't need to have an external database (the blockchain) for their concept to work. They could allow Vuele accounts to trade ownership of download rights and set up a marketplace for people to buy and sell.
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.
Imagine a world where if you cite a paper on your thesis you have to provide the NFT transaction ID so it can be checked if you acquired the article via the official blockchain
I hope people take this as an example of why, regardless of who technically owns the ledger, publicly, digitally tokenizing everything would in many ways make life hellish.
There is still the problem that people can upload the book contents into their brains and hold it there in perpetuity... but I am sure our friends in Big Pharma will be able to devise a consumer safe-ish solution to this problem.
Allow me to play devil's advocate here for a moment.
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.
Pearson isn't going to give any money to authors with this scheme. Their contracts with authors will just specify they only get paid a royalty on primary sales. Authors will need to keep up the edition churn if they want to keep getting a cut of sales.
> 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.