Textbooks become more expensive as Pearson wants NFTs to track secondary sales

by · August 2, 2022

Textbook publisher Pearson has revealed its plans to use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to track digital textbook sales and effectively “reduce the secondary market”.

According to an Aug. 1 Bloomberg report, Pearson CEO Andy Bird wants to assign NFTs to its digital textbooks to better track sales and capture revenue previously lost to the used market.

Bird hopes the company can use the technology to earn a commission on used sales of its textbooks, which are usually done privately from one student to another. Bird noted:

“Technology like blockchain and NFTs allow us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life. The opportunity to participate in downstream revenue […] I think it’s very interesting.”

He noted that a Pearson textbook is typically resold up to seven times over its lifetime.

While Pearson explores the possibilities of blockchain technology to remove additional sales revenue, Bird added that his company would look at how his company can benefit from Metaverse.

“We have a whole team working on the implications of the metaverse and what it could mean for us.”

Entering the Metaverse could be lucrative in the medium term if the market value of the virtual world is to meet expectations by exceeding $50 billion by 2026.

The London-based publisher is part of a growing group of academic entities looking at the Metaverse. Last week, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) launched its first classroom in the Metaverse.

However, the company’s plans to use NFTs have been met with some criticism from the community.

Some academics, such as research fellow at Intel Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, decried Pearson’s “predatory academic publishing” but conceded that this is “probably where NFT technology is headed.” In its August 2 chirpingadded Cooper “We need to look closely at this.”

Others say that Pearson’s supposed plans for NFTs don’t actually use NFT technology at all.

Technology analyst Ian Cutress said in an Aug. 2 tweet that “NFT is just a buzzword here,” and what Pearson calls an NFT is just a code that second-hand buyers must pay a fee to activate their digital books.

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Pearson is already one of the largest publishers in the world with $4.2 billion in revenue by 2021. Their textbooks are used in high schools, colleges and universities around the world.

The company is on course to beat that mark in 2022 as first-half revenue came in at $2.2 billion and profits are up 14% to $208.7 million in the same period, according to the Aug. 1 Telegraph.