Web3 Publishing News, August 5th 2022
Web3 Publishing News #1: NiftyLit, PublishedNFT, BOOK Token, Pearson
The summer has been a busy time for web3 publishing. Despite the onset of crypto-winter and world events at-large, market volatility and other less-than-favorable conditions have not stopped web3 builders (like us) from building. Since this is our first one of these, we’ll keep it brief and just provide a small handful of web3 publishing highlights from the last few of months. There’s WAY more news and happenings out there in this space than what’s listed below, but this feels like a great start.
Some housekeeping: we’ll post these types of articles a few times a month, sometimes more if there’s a plethora of news to share. If you have news or articles you’d like us to feature in this psuedo-column, please email info@niftylit.io. And if you’re wondering to yourself: why on earth would NiftyLit want to highlight potential competitors? We’ll answer by quoting our CTO Alex, who was quoting JFK, who was quoting another source (the origins are detailed here), and just repeat a phrase that the rest of us had never heard before:
“A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Getting on with it, here’s some highlights (including one on us…had to!):
NiftyLit made the news in May when we pubished our first Literay NFT as a “sneak preview,” ahead of our magazine’s launch. “The Buddha” by Paul G. Heller was named the “first ever literary NFT” by a few outlets, including NFT Evening. It turns out press releases work! We were flattered. Our name was also featured alongside Prada and Formula one on NFTGo.io’s Twitter, which was neat. We haven’t sold many so there’s still plenty available if you want to buy one to read here (the free reading period on our website is over). It’s also a fabulous story written by a wonderful human being.
PublishedNFT announced an official partnership with Dapper Labs in July, officially bringing web3 publishing into the Flow ecosystem. Flow offers a lot of potential for bringing “normies” into web3, and the use-case for publishing ebooks on Flow make it a very compelling L1 Blockchain for this purpose (learn more about Flow by reading or listening to this post by Not Boring: Flow: The Normie Blockchain).
By the way, Not Boring by Packy McCormick is a favorite of ours here at NiftyLit…Packy if we ever make it on your radar, we love Not Boring!
BOOK Token, who is developing “The Book Ecosystem of the Future” dropped their first NFT book, the Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg Edition, in late July, followed by Cardano for the Masses by John Greene just a few days ago. This article by Yahoo says they sold $100K on their first day of publication. No doubt they’re garnering some attention! Forthcoming titles include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (one of Jo’s absolute favorites, but who doesn’t love Frankenstein?) and it looks they’ll be publishing other works in the public domain as NFTs. They have an eReader dApp ready to go, and it goes without saying that their Discord is buzzing.
This Bloomberg article got some web3 publishing news attention earlier this week, announcing that Pearson Plc (one of the world’s largest textbook publishing companies) is investigating the benefits of blockchain for textbook sales, primarily because of the possibilty to earn from secondary transactions/ sales of their textbooks on the blockchain. When we read it we were like, “yeah, duh” but it’s exciting to see the world catching on to the tremendous benefits of on-blockchain publishing (and sometimes scary for us small fish just trying to make a name for ourselves in the big pond of publishing companies, so to speak).
That’s it! Any questions, comments, or concerns please send them our way! info@niftylit.io is a great way to get in touch with us, or you can always stop by our Discord.