School textbooks, as NFTs (but why?)
If we've learned anything from teen movies, it's this:
The key to any 'outcast, to cool kid' makeover is taking your glasses off and letting your hair down.
And if school textbooks were a frumpy freshman, they'd be about to buy some contacts and throw out their scrunchies.
The textbook publisher, Pearson, has just announced plans to turn its textbooks into NFTs.
Why? To make them easier to sell on the secondary market.
And it makes sense - how many times did you ever open a textbook after you graduated from 8th grade math?
While textbook re-sale opportunities may not have been high on your list of interests back in middle school, there's actually a huge market for it.
Pearson has been rolling out their digital strategy for years, even introducing the ‘Pearson+’ subscription app last year.
Pearson's plan is to charge a $10 ‘reactivation fee’ each time a digital textbook is resold, with sales tracked on the blockchain.
(Feels like it would make more sense to build a royalty fee into the smart contracts but hey, that’s just us).
Here’s why this could be genius:
Kids are a tough market to target when trying to make old products feel new and cool. Selling textbooks as NFTs could give them back a bit of the ol' razzle dazzle.
On a similar note, textbooks are an interesting product because the buyers are typically the parents, whereas the consumers are kids. This could be a sort of ‘2 birds, 1 stone’ scenario in onboarding people into Web3.
As they say in the article, the textbooks are already being resold. If they can pull off charging a reactivation fee each time, it’s sure to increase revenue.
Can they pull it off? It remains to be seen.
Could it push the adoption of Web3 further forwards in the education space?
Absolutely.