Will NFTs Be the Next Disruptor of the Publishing Industry?
The short is: yes.
In the way that ebooks and then self-publishing upended the publishing industry, NFTs will have a similar disruption and force publishing companies to adapt or become dinosaurs.
Here’s why
Each evolutionary layer of publishing has been the result of the author gaining more creative control, more interaction with its reader, and more royalties. NFTs raise the bar in all these areas.
The early rollouts (or “drops”) of NFTs gave the impression that NFTs are gimmicky art projects only for rich people with too much money. While that might be true, we can thank these early adopters for working out the kinks (and lawsuits, i.e. Miramax v. Quentin Tarantino) as NFTs continue to become more accessible to everyone. Yes, even the average book nerd.
Here’s how NFTs differ from anything we’ve experienced
When you buy an ebook from Amazon or Apple or wherever, you don’t own that ebook. Of course, you don’t own the copyright, but you don’t even own your copy. The ebook is sort of on permanent loan from the bookseller, not to mention reliant on their e-reader. If Amazon decided to fold (haha), it would go down along with the ebooks sitting in your Kindle. That’s of course unlikely and not a motivating factor for NFTs, but it makes the point of what true ownership means and how it can apply to other transactions.
This is the brilliance of decentralization and the foundation of Web3. No longer will consumers or creators be reliant on the middleman who takes a chunk of the sales. As a result, the reader can have a more direct experience with the author and the author has the opportunity for much higher royalties.
How an NFT book works
An NFT is a file represented by a digital token and recorded on the blockchain. The file can be any multimedia file format that you would normally use and store on your computer. Hence, you can have art NFTs, video NFTs, music NFTs, and book NFTs. It’s the recordation of the digital file on the blockchain that evidences your ownership. (No more sales receipts!)
For book NFTs, a reader is included in the file for an ebook reading experience. The best news is that once you’re done, you can resell it. Upon resale, you make money AND the author gets secondary market royalties. Imagine, as an author, getting paid an automatic 10-15% royalty every time your book is sold at a used bookstore. This is now possible with an NFT because the blockchain records every transaction with code built in to compensate the author accordingly.
Other Benefits of NFTs in Publishing
The sale of a book NFT is only a small portion of what’s possible in book publishing. An NFT can contain much more than just the book. In fact, it doesn’t even need to contain the book. Instead, the NFT can be the gateway into a community of fans, a book launch campaign, or a legacy building platform for authors with rare collectibles. Think digitally signed author copies, limited editions, memorabilia, and exclusive author events. There is a limited number of NFTs available per project set by the creator (hence why it’s “non-fungible”), and thus an exclusivity factor exists that differs from ebooks.
The possibilities are endless especially when you start to think of fiction books with avid fans who want more access to the created world and its characters. Of course, NFTs aren’t just for fiction authors. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, recently minted and dropped an NFT project on OpenSea via BookCoin using quotes from the book as tokens to unreleased content and access to his private community.
For books already published, NFTs can give new life and added benefits to readers. (Whether the publisher or the author owns the NFT subsidiary rights is a topic for another article.)
The Very Near Future of NFT Books
The fortune of NFTs favors the bold, that is, the creative. Authors with an active community will thrive in this new world as it offers additional value for fans and increased royalties in turn.
Technology continues to reduce the barrier of entry for authors and lower the red rope access for fans.
For now, NFTs are an additional medium through which authors can deliver and market their work, similar to the simultaneous existence of ebooks and paper copies. NFTs will give authors another reason to pause and consider whether it’s in their best interest to self-publish and fully exploit their NFT options or to traditionally publishing where their options and royalties are limited.
Eventually, when everyone has a “wallet” in their mobile device, I expect NFT books will replace ebooks just as digital music replaced CDs that replaced cassettes. The “limited” NFT release will be no different to a first edition run of, for example, 5000 copies.
Ultimately, it's not a question of if NFTs will disrupt publishing, but when.