Publisher to profit from sale of used textbooks sold as NFTs

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Publisher to profit from sale of used textbooks sold as NFTs

8 August 2022

Publishers may soon see more return from the sale of second-hand electronic books, if a proposal by British educational and textbook publisher Pearson to sell their titles as NTFs is successful.

Educational books are often sold more than once, since students sell study resources they no longer require. Publishers have not previously been able to make any money from secondhand sales, but the rise of digital textbooks has created an opportunity for companies to benefit.

NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item by recording it on a decentralised digital register known as a blockchain. Typically these items are images or videos, but the technology allows for just about anything to be sold and owned in this way.

At the moment few digital books are sold as NFTs, with the exception of some self-published novels, though this may change in the wake of Pearson’s proposal.