We all have digital assets sleeping somewhere that we don’t use anymore. From skins in League Of Legends or golds in World Of Warcraft to games in your phone or books in your Kindle. Book.io resolves that last part and will reward you for reading. What if you could sell or exchange the ebooks you already read ? What if you could disrupt Amazon monopoly while rewarding the authors you like with second market royalties ? You got it, one bee is no swarm but Book.io is the start of something. Something that us -crypto investors- cherish: Liberty.
Dystopian promises or possible future ? Its very probable that the malicious beast won’t surender without fighting. Let’s have a closer look on how the team wants to revolutionize the way we interact with ebooks.
1. What Is Book.io?
Owning your assets should be the reason why you bought crypto at first, be able to send and receive whenever and whatever you want without anyone being able to stop you.
Bitcoin changed the way we look at our money. Ethereum changed the way we look at Finance. Book.io will change the way we look at our ebooks and audiobooks.
Today when you buy an ebook on your Kindle or Apple Books, you pay for it and then it’s “yours”. Well I must admit I dont feel like I hold any book at all… Not because it is a dematerialized asset but because I can only read it. I bought the right to read that book for life -or when the company I bought it from decide otherwise- and that’s it.
Digitalizing books has made major companies owners of our assets and Web3 is here to disrupt this.
This is why Book token was born. Remove from their filthy hands those rights and give it back to us where it belongs.
Based on Cardano Blockchain (Find out more about What Is Cardano here), the mainnet of the book ecosystem is live since 07.20.2022. The funding round included 3 Publishing Companies CEO’s and has raised 550K$ in its initial phase. Book token is bringing ebooks and audiobooks on the blockchain with true digital ownership and a revolutionary platform.
The main goal is to give back ownership to users, liberty, but also reward readers when they read. And also, furnishing a full set of minting (publishing) tools for authors and making them able to receive second market royalties. Further up, they will implement an education program that will allow to verifiy student’s reading and record everything a student has ever read. They will then be able to create massive databases of reading consumption for educational purposes.
2. How Does The Book.io Ecosystem Work?
There are two main features behind Book.io : The book ecosystem and the book token
For the book ecosystem, the team needed to turn books into NFTs to prove your ownership and enabling the exchanges. But what about the book data ? They have created and patented the first fully Decentralised Encrypted Asset (DEA-Ebook) so the book data are encrypted on chain.
This way, your NFT book can be sold on any Cardano marketplace (like CNFT.io, JPG.Store…) ! The cover will be displayed like any other NFT while the book itself is encrypted inside.
This way you are rewarding the author with second market royalties, just like any other NFT collection.
The team is now in discussion with many publishing firms and known authors to enhance their catalog.
For the book token, the team plan is to have the first read to earn concept. After buying my book, I am rewarded with $BOOK token (wich is native on cardano chain). I will then be able to use these tokens to buy more books on the book.io platform or transfer to other cardano wallets.
This will be a bit speculative and is from my pure imagination: in the future I believe that there could be some lending and borrowing of assets (ebooks) creating a real BookFinance ecosystem.
The book.io website and app will be the way we read our NFT books, the IOS and Android app will be launched along with the marketplace and book exchange soon. Also, the team is building a SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows reading tablets manufacturers to access your NFT ebooks, which in my opinion will not happen anytime soon (hello Amazon).
This way, the Book team is building a complete ecosystem around the ebooks NFT industry, involving buying and selling, swaps, connecting authors and publisher closer to their readers. This is a win/win situation for the authors and readers.
Authors will be freed from Amazon outstanding fees and will earn second market royalties on their book selling. Also, Book.io team will help authors with the mint&publish portal that will revolutionize the way indie authors work, announced for early 2023. We don’t have very much informations about this but I believe that it is a complete set of tools to help onboard easily new authors that are not in the web3 yet.
Readers will -finally- get true ownership of their digital assets enabling the possibility to buy and sell, for reading or for speculation as well. Indeed some books will be minted in smaller batches creating scarcity, the only thing then needed to increase prices will be then buy-demand. Also, the readers will be rewarded with the dedicated supply of book tokens (30% of total) for their reading. Theses tokens will then be used to buy more books or exchanged against other cryptocurrencies.
3. The Team And The Partnerships Of Book.io
The team behind Book.io are no begginers in the book/publishing industry and IT stuff, they all have a background in both domains, some have participated in the creation of Bookshout.com, which they have sold now. This company had 6 millions users over the world, 1.5 millions ebooks available and is curently in the top 10 reading apps on the Google Play Store.
The fully doxxed team has a very large experience in the booking industry and it is sure that they kept contacts with the right people to secure some big partnerships in the future.
4. Book.io: Book token As An Investment
So how do I get started ? Right now the project is at his very begining so the only thing that you can do is click here to see more information and to participate in the crowdsale. Imagine, the whitepaper is not even out yet ! I found out that their discord is very active and there are plenty of additional information to find there. There is also a lot to find on their Twitter.
However we have some information on the book token ! Let’s have a look at tokenomics.
Book Token has a supply of 10,000,000,000 (10B tokens) with this allocation:
- 15 % for Tech Development
- 25% Fundraising
- 30 % Team and Acquisitions
- 30 % Reader Mining
The ICO (Initial Token Offering) has not been open to the public now but you can subscribe for the newletter on their website. The ICO was announced for late summer 2022 so I belive it will happen very soon !
5. Conclusion
While having a lot to build and prove I belive that the book ecosystem has this taste of early crypto gem. With less than 7000 followers on Twitter I think it is time for the team to push on marketing as they have the first mover advantage on the web3 book revolution.
As profesionnals in the ebook industry I strongly belive that the book catalog will enhance itself rapidly and I wonder how they will implement scarcity for the book’s minting.
Some other blockchains has announced they were building tech products, I hope one day the team will be able to produce their own web3 reading tablet, obliterating the ebook game. And freeing us a litlle big more from web2 monopolys.
n.b: this is not financial advice
