Blockchain for books: It’s a match that could be seen more and more, as the first “blockchain bestseller” was revealed earlier this month at the London Book Fair when Publica—a new publishing platform that uses blockchain technology in the funding, distribution, sale, and promotion of books—announced the release of its first book on Google Play. The move came at the same time—also at the London Book Fair—when a white paper was releasd detailing the blockchain for authors and creators.
Read on and click through to read the entire article from Publishers Weekly, which gives a primer on blockchain for publishers and authors who might be new to the field, and also discusses the promise blockchain holds for creators, especially self-published authors—perhaps further opening a field once dominated by white men to women and other underrepresented authors, like Sukhi Jutla, the first “blockchain author.”
History was made at the 2018 London Book Fair—at a Tuesday afternoon session, Josef Marc, CEO of upstart blockchain publisher Publica, announced that the company had just gone live in the Google Play Store with author Sukhi Jutla’s Escape The Cubicle: Quit The Job You Hate—in effect, Marc said, creating the world’s first #1 title on the “blockchain bestseller” list.
Of course, there isn’t really a blockchain bestseller list—at least not yet. But the burgeoning technology—best known in the finance industry for powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin—holds promise for publishing, supporters say. And at a panel packed with curious authors and publishers at the 2018 London Book Fair, The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) handed out its just-released white paper “Authors and the Blockchain: Towards a Creator Centered Business Model,” and heard from a panel of experts and early adopters.
For many in the audience, the most obvious questions was: what exactly is blockchain? Essentially, as the ALLi white paper explains, the blockchain is a public ledger system that enables people to transfer “unique pieces of digital property,” known as blocks, in a way that is totally secure, transparent, time-stamped, decentralized and irreversible. Essentially, all necessary details are coded into the blocks, and once accepted, the blocks become an unalterable part of the blockchain.
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