We propose a novel way of producing, distributing, and interacting with ebooks, making use of the power of blockchains, leveraging its decentralised nature to give full ownership of the ebooks to the user. By making each copy of an ebook an NFT, we enable secondary transactions on ebooks, creating an entirely new marketplace. This enables a positive-sum system, where the book reader, the author and the publisher all generate additional revenue, thereby giving the industry a much needed help in staying alive, and attracting more users into the world of books as well. We believe Non-Fungible Tokens are a perfect application for ebooks, as there is no way to distinguish between two ebook copies of the same title under the current status quo. Ebooks provide a perfect use case for NFTs as well, beyond just collectibles.
Books have been synonymous with knowledge for millennia. They were priced possessions of scholars and aristocratic libraries until the advent of The Gutenberg Press. The Printing Press made production and reproduction of books astronomically cheaper, and this lead to mass literacy, which led to the Enlightenment and eventually, modernity. The publishing industry went through many iterations on the details of publishing books, experimenting with hardbacks and paperbacks, independent publishing vs publishing houses, etc before arriving at the current business models, which is an amalgamation of different strategies and is more or less identical in all major economies and publishing houses.
The digital revolution brought with it the digitisation of books as well, and ebooks were poised to be the next big thing in publishing. Everyone in the industry was excited about the potential disruption of the industry, of new business models and profits. Ebooks, coupled with mobile devices were poised to free us of large and cumbersome bookshelves, while providing us with orders of magnitude more information, all in the palm of our hands. But that vision is yet to pass. While there are more books being published these days, ebooks remain a minor medium in which books are consumed.
The digital revolution began with the advent of computers, which followed the famous Moore’s Law. A many-decades long price reduction and other innovations made computers cheap enough for the ordinary consumer, and with the beginning of the internet in the early 90’s, the information age was well under way. Visionaries and engineers dreamed of digitising money, and a scientist named Nick Szabo proposed what’s called as smart contracts: a digital version of legal contracts, executed in the digital realm and making it binding for the actors. These ideas and dreams very early for the technology, and it would take more than a decade for the world to catch up. The house market collapse in the US, followed by the recession, saw a lot of value being wiped out from the economy, and also the potential pitfalls in having systems that are too centralised. Shortly after the collapse, the world was presented with the Bitcoin Whitepaper: a proposal for a truly decentralised currency.
The idea caught on and early adopters and enthusiasts started building and using Bitcoin as a currency, as a commodity. It wasn’t long before the realisation that this sort of decentralisation can be for more than just currency: it can be anything at all. The underlying layer of Bitcoin, the blockchain, can be a general purpose technology. All sorts of transactions and interactions among humans, between humans and other entities, everything can be decentralised, and the blockchain provides the underlying mechanism of how to maintain the ground truth of these interactions, without centralised power.
The publishing industry of today is a plethora of different business models and practices, after having gone through various societal and technological changes and innovations over a period of five centuries. Books are being published independently by authors, without the gate keepers of publishing houses, in various forms: from the traditional hardcover to the popular paperbacks to the more recent online forms: ebooks on the web, Kindle Direct Publishing etc, to WattPad, where a chapter or so of a story is released at a time and the readers also take part in the writing of the stories. The publishing houses navigate different landscapes to reach readers as well: different editions of HardCover, Paperbacks, and various reading devices and apps like iPad, e-ink reading devices like Kindle etc. Amazon Kindle clearly has a major market share in digital publishing, as all major publishers go through Kindle to sell their ebooks to the readers.
It is worth to note here that, even after all these new innovations and technical advancements of the information age, book publishing and consumption is still sticking to the old ways: almost 75% of the revenue from books, a majority by far, comes from physical copies of books, hardcovers and paperbacks. After an initial enthusiasm and adoption in the early 2010s, ebook sales have stagnated considerably. Ebooks cumulatively, with all its various forms and sales channels, make for only one fourth of the entire publishing world, and has been staying stable at that market share for more than half a decade now, if not declining slightly. Ebooks, while having lauded as the next big thing in publishing and set to revolutionise the whole publishing industry has fallen far short on its promises and prophecies, and consumers have responded accordingly by going back to the good old fashioned hard copies: both hardcovers and paperbacks. This is all the more disappointing, considering the fact that a hard copy of a book instills more cost, and, crucially, far more carbon footprint than an ebook, both in production and in distribution. They further take up space and energy at the consumer’s end too: a physical copy takes up physical storage space in this increasingly crammed world.
The consumer behaviour sends an unmistakable signal: despite all the cost effectiveness and ease of storage and transportation etc, ebooks are unattractive. The cumbersome physical copies are still a (far) better product than an ebook, that consumers don’t mind all the extra effort that physical books come with. While this would have been a minor disappointment for the publishers in a different scenario, this is an absolute disaster for a global civilisation caught in the midst of climate change and trying to cut back its carbon footprint in every way possible.
While blockchain adoption is still in its infancy, the world saw a myriad of use cases using the technology in the past few years or so. 2021 would be remembered as the NFT year: NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens, gained massive popularity within the crypto community and NFT as a jargon entered into the public’s perception. NFTs were traded for millions of dollars and blockchain as a whole enjoyed a lot of news coverage as a result. While this is great in the short term, the recent trends point to the impossible sustainability of such hype cycles, and the fact that mass adoption in the long term would require real utility for the end user, not just hyped pictures by celebrities. While the one-to-many interactions of celebrities and artists are great, we believe a truly mass adoption would be made possible when NFTs are a lot more than just pictures: they could represent anything at all, and they can facilitate many-to-many interactions, in the peer-to-peer manner.
The platform we present, Prānah, is the amalgamation of these two worlds: the world of publishing and the world of blockchains. We propose a platform where ebook copies are represented as NFTs: each copy of every book title is turned into an NFT and assigned ownership to the users.
Novel behaviours are made possible with this: while ebook copies are suddenly made unique entities like their physical counterparts, the production and distribution costs of the physical world are completely skipped. It is the the perfect blend of bits and atoms: the uniqueness and property rights of the atoms, while all the convenience of the world of bits.