Let's Talk About NFT Books

Now that everyone has calmed down.

Ugh, you’re probably thinking. NFTs. Didn’t we already do this? They burst onto the scene in 2021 to global popularity, peaked when Paris Hilton promoted her Bored Ape on Jimmy Fallon (in one of the most soul-crushing bits of television I’ve ever seen, and no I’m not linking to it), and then crashed so hard they put tulip bulbs to shame. A few lucked into an obscene amount of money, everyone else lost what they’d put in. Disaster. Let’s never talk about NFTs again.

Actually, let’s. Haha. Even worse, here’s a subscribe button:

First a paragraph to cleanse your palate. Forget about all the hype, the scams, the crash. NFTs are just a type of technology. They’re tokens that live on a blockchain and differ from cryptocurrencies because they’re non-fungible. While you can swap one bitcoin for another bitcoin because they have exactly the same value (they’re fungible; interchangeable; like swapping a dollar for a dollar), you can’t do that with an NFT because each NFT is unique.

NFTs live on a blockchain where everyone can see which wallet address owns a particular NFT, but only the wallet owner can access that NFT with a private key. No one else can. That’s the beauty of a blockchain. It removes all intermediaries. There’s no custodian, no third party to control your assets. When you have the private key to an NFT, it’s yours and yours alone. No one else can touch it or change it, ever.

And that’s really the one underlying principle that matters the most: Ownership. NFTs allow you to have full ownership over your digital assets. You buy something and it really is actually yours. That wasn’t really technologically possible before, but now it is.

Here’s the Problem

Ownership is important because right now, when you buy something online, it’s almost never really yours. Let’s take books. You think you own the books on your Kindle because you clicked the Buy button on amazon.com? Wrong. You bought a license to access the content. The actual book is still under Amazon’s control:

Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.
—Kindle Store Terms of Use

You may think, so what? I’ve never had a problem with my Kindle books. Let Amazon have ownership over them. It’s all the same to me.

You apathetic creature.

Don’t you think it's wrong to spend money on something and then not actually own it? Imagine buying a T-shirt at Uniqlo but you’re really only buying the license to wear it. Uniqlo still owns the T-shirt and, if they want, they can recall it or change its design and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

This may sound silly, but that’s exactly what happened to the e-book editions of Roald Dahl. In 2019, Dahl’s publisher Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers who looked over his works. Then they made hundreds of changes, especially around race, sex, and character:

• “white with horror” became “agog with horror”

• “fat” became “enormous” or “large”

• The character Small Fox in Fantastic Mr Fox was turned from male into female

Here’s the kicker: Puffin Books then pushed those revisions to everyone’s devices without asking for their permission. The changes were made and the people who bought (licensed) the Dahl books couldn’t do anything about it. Done was done.

First, I don’t think it’s okay to change the language of books because of modern sensitivities. It’s erasing history in subtle, but nefarious ways by removing the context within which those books were written. How are we supposed to know what people thought about race and gender back then when we change the language to accommodate our current ideas?

Second, it goes against the will of the author. Dahl has been quoted as forcing his publishers to not “so much as change a single comma in one of my books.” The changes that Puffin Books pushed through probably have him spinning in his grave so much he’s an undiscovered perpetual source of energy.

Third, even if you’re fine with the changes, isn’t it too much power in the hands of companies? Do we really want to continue building a society where companies own all the digital stuff we buy online? It’s easy to think they won’t abuse that power, until they do and it’s too late. This is why data privacy matters too.

If technology exists to actually own digital things, then let’s use that technology and take some power away from companies. Less corporatocracy, please. I’d rather not live in a dystopian cyberpunk future¹.

There Are Many More Benefits

The main benefit of NFTs is ownership. You own what you buy. A book moves directly from the author to the buyer. It leaves one wallet, goes to another. No publisher or distributor in between. That’s nice. Power to the people. But there are many other benefits too.

For one, authors can include more than just the book when someone buys their book NFT. An NFT is a token that points to the place where the goods are stored. You should put the book in that place, but you can also put other things there, like unique cover art, an audiobook, an invitation to an event, access to an exclusive community, et cetera.

Kings of Leon did this when they turned their album When You See Yourself into an NFT. The NFT album was more expensive than the regular album, but it included alternative cover art and a limited-edition vinyl along with the actual music. One version of the NFT album even gave buyers front-row seats for life to Kings of Leon concerts.

NFTs allow you to play around with what you offer.

You could also include a special token with your book. For example, if I had an NFT book, I could include a $TDM token with each sale (for Thomas De Moor, my name). Those tokens could then be traded on a secondary market based on how well I’m doing as an author.

If I have a George R.R. Martin moment, that one token could be worth more than what you paid for the book. It could equally be worthless, but if you paid regular price for the book and get the token along with it, that doesn’t really matter.

The point is that the reader owns their digital assets and that the author can be creative with what they offer.

It’s a Long Road Ahead

Books have always evolved through technology. Just as the printing press made books more widely available, NFT place digital books firmly in the hands of those who buy it. They allow for a direct and honest relationship between author and reader.

But there’s still a long road ahead. There are many challenges to overcome, but first I want to talk about something that’s not a challenge for NFTs: the climate. One reason why people were so upset about NFTs in 2021 was because the blockchains they were hosted on consumed tonnes of energy.

That’s no longer the case. I don’t want to make this too technical, but the only blockchain that still consumes stupid amounts of energy is the Bitcoin blockchain. Almost all the other ones use a newer mechanism to validate transactions that no longer relies on computing power: Proof of Stake (PoS) instead of Proof of Work (PoW). A blockchain like Ethereum consumes very little energy.

Ethereum no longer consumes a lot of energy (source)

The biggest challenge for NFT books is the implementation of it all. For one, it’s important that not just the NFT, but also the actual assets are stored in a place that’s not owned by one entity. There’s no point having the NFT on a blockchain when the goods are stored on a centralized server under someone’s control. A decentralized delivery network like IPFS solves that problem, but even that relies on IPFS’s ability to keep running.

Second, we’ll need some kind of app or, even better, a device that provides a nice reading experience. Something like a Kindle, but with the ability to connect your NFTs to the goods those NFTs represent and without the ability to remove or alter those goods. You shouldn’t have to be technically savvy to read your NFT books.

Third, the drive to NFT books isn’t going to come from big publishers or distributors. They like things as they currently are. It’s going to come from a few visionaries who believe in a better world. It’ll be a David v. Goliath fight to convince people that there’s a better way to buy and read books, but that’s how it usually is with big technological and ideological innovations.

It’s Already Happening

All this being said, NFT books are already happening. Popular author Joseph Nassisse is selling NFT books, as is Mark Cuban with his new book How to Win at the Sport of Business. Both are selling their books through Book.io, a Web3 marketplace for books.

It’s a little crude, kinda scrappy, somewhat rough around the edges, but so are all things at the start. People are experimenting. They’re testing the boundaries of what’s possible with NFTs, and that’s good. I’m all for it. I’m happy the hype has come and gone. Now we can consider NFTs through a clearer lens and see that they’re not as bad as they were made out to be in 2021.

Who knows, when I’ve written my first book, I may experiment with NFTs too.

1. It’s not just books. It’s games too. And it’s getting worse and worse. I’d already written the first draft of this article when a Ubisoft executive said that gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games. Yikes.