This is just a short rant about missing progress in the area I'm passionate about and a big consumer of. It's also an area where I don’t see much movement since 2022. PUBLISHING is a lifelong passion of mine.
I mean publishing of anything -> books, magazines, art, but also audio publishing, video, and movies. Soon also short AI-generated stories.
I am not seeing any progress 😬 I don't see somebody making Kindle-like publishing easier and more accessible onchain. Even though it seems to me that this area is the one where it makes the most sense and people are willing to spend money right now. 🤩
I don’t honestly believe that people want to "mint" everything instead of just "liking" it. Let's face it, that way you are just collecting a lot of "something" that has no meaning to you, and overtime it has no real or emotional value.
But that's very different from when you buy a book or a movie. I believe most of us do want to really own the book when we buy it. I mean, I've always wanted it and it was like that when it was on paper. It wasn't perfect because you could never borrow a book friend on the other side of the ocean, and you could never recall the book if the friend stopped being a friend. 😃
Same with movies and music. I buy a movie on my Apple device, but the problem is I can never leave iTunes. I buy books on Kindle but they're not mine. Same for books on iBooks. When I pay for these items, I wanna own them. And I'm missing this problem being solved.
I know we're now in reverse - like don’t pay for anything, or don’t pay too much, and own it. But I believe that's not what most people want or need in the long run. I want to own what I pay for. This is existing market; I still pay for the books and movies, or magazines while I own nothing. That bothers me.
Can someone please make this use-case happen!
PS: If you know about anyone or any project building this and I missed it, please let me know!
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I am equally excited about the publishing x AI x onchain intersection. Major missing opportunity to both validate work and lock in defensibility around generative content or remixes for a new type of "book publishing" experience
Absolutely! I have to say, last year I thought it would already be here but we're getting very close - I imagine a book written (or rather adapted) to your mood or choice of a villain. Reading or publishing by chapter a day or week (recently enjoyed that experiment) and all related IP tracking onchain is very exciting.
I am not seeing much progress in PUBLISHING 😬 I don't see somebody making Kindle-like publishing easier and more accessible onchain. Am I missing something? https://paragraph.xyz/@buildbetter/publishing-onchain-1
Thanks for writing this. I've long been thinking the same way, and I was just talking with @tokenizedhuman the other day about my wish for a "web3 Gumroad" to publish some of my longer writings. I'm guessing the lack of progress in publishing has something to do with the business models, but don't quote me on that.
I’m very surprised that we don’t have solid web3 Gumroad as you call it. I just saw that Alexandria Labs is still alive but it’s too small and underfunded to have serious impact 🤷♂️ any time soon https://x.com/alexandrialabs?s=21&t=vGdL6gMJv0qcvymUV8209g
Unfortunately, "underfunded" describes the vast majority of publishing entities I know about. So there's part of the problem...
I wonder if the main issue here is that the audience for purchasing books in crypto just doesn't exist yet. I remember a few crypto orientated publishing projects trying to solve this - I forget their names now - but never succeeded. I agree that the potential to own your own content is a massive selling point yet that isn't widely understood in the digital age as a possibility. Books, games, music, part of this is how we consume it all, part of it is because no one is offering an alternative that creators want to jump to. I believe the tech is there. If we can make crypto wallets, there is no reason we can't make physical or digital devices that act as 'readers' for this content. Owning your own content means you can sell it on if you want to, something that can't currently be done with traditional ebooks. The author would also be able to set the royalty they wanted to. Copyright might be an issue too, although that is currently an issue anyway.
DRM is a big barrier to this unfortunately. People are still of the mind that they need to keep files locked down on centralized servers/hardware. Hopefully we can move past this.