You’ve probably heard of NFTs by now–if not, you can read one of the many fine primers on non-fungible tokens or else saunter back to a charmed life unsullied by faddish meme-stocks.
Still here?
Good. I’m not an expert in blockchain tech, cryptocurrency, or NFTs. When I say that I take a dim view of them all, I’m really just parroting the most persuasive lines from crypto-skeptics who sound more convincing–more humane, more grounded, more humble–than the crypto world’s biggest advocates. Then again, I was against environmentally-damaging energy use and the creeping financialization and datafication of life long before I knew about crypto, so my priors are doing most of the lifting there.
With all that said, I think everybody can agree on two things: NFTs are a hash of digital, financial, and metaphysical flim-flam whose value depends entirely on an ever-escalating mixture of status-seeking and stupidity; and because of that, they’re probably here to stay and will continue to make oodles of money. And if they’re not going away, we might as well start thinking how we might direct that firehose of cash towards the world of books and literature.
What follows is a list of how NFTs have been and might be used to make money for writers, artists, readers, and booksellers. Following Ted Gioia’s excellent example with music NFTs, the list is organized from the highly practical to the howling edge of technical feasibility and good taste. If any of these take off, you heard it here first.
Rights and Royalties
Let’s start with smart contracts, which are already a thing and could be coming soon to a publisher near you. A smart contract is a program that automatically executes during transactions on a blockchain.
The most important and obvious use for artists and writers here is royalties: every time an NFT tied to the writer’s work is sold, their royalties can be instantly and automatically deducted from the payment as a percentage or a flat rate. In an instant, whole accounting departments vanish from the big publishers and authors get back all the days, months, and years spent waiting for royalty checks. For every first sale, an author would get their royalties immediately.
In fact, an author could get a cut every time that NFT re-sells, too. When they do this in Europe, where it’s standard in the art market, it gets the classy name of droit de suite; in the United States, we call it “probably a pyramid scheme,” although that depends on whether or not the smart contract includes all the NFT’s previous owners on the blockchain or just the original. But all of this presupposes a digital marketplace for used books. Is that possible?
Re-sellable Digital Books
In theory, yes. The short explanation here is that a digital copy of a book tied to an NFT could uphold the first-sale doctrine with ebooks. Right now, when you buy a Kindle version of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (to pick something from my wishlist) from Amazon, you aren’t actually buying a personal copy, but a license to download a copy. Because you don’t own your Kindle version of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, you can’t legally share it or sell it to somebody else. Amazon could even yank the file right out of your Kindle if they ever lose the license. And as US District Court of Southern New York found in Capitol Records v ReDigi, you can’t resell a regular, non-blockchain digital file.
With NFTs, though, it becomes possible to certify your unique digital copy of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs. It becomes your property, just like a paper copy of the book: you can keep it, destroy it, or sell it as you please. Digital books, then, would have a used-book market just like their paper counterparts, loaned to friends or sold to used-book sellers, allowing for freer circulation and a cheaper, more independent marketplace for books. Amazon’s borderline-monopoly on ebook prices is crushed, new businesses form to fill the niche, and ebooks get cheaper.
This sounds fantastic. The problem is, the sign is not the signified and the token is not the book: NFTs may be unique, but the digital file containing the book is not, and could be infinitely reproduced like any other bit of code. We’ve already been here with music and CDs in the Napster era: yes, the jewel cases were pretty to look at and hold, but the real value was in the music, which any computer could separate from the disc and upload to the internet. In this model, NFTs are to books as those CDs are to music: an expensive case to a product you can get online for peanuts.
A few indie groups are currently trying out this NFT model, but I don’t see it catching on: they are essentially asking customers to pay a lot more for the same product out of the goodness of their hearts, and it’s not clear why we need that when we already have Patreon. Odious as it may seem, the Overdrive/Amazon licensing model seems better-adapted to the reality of digital books and how we use them. There might be one case, though, where NFTs might catch on as commodities…
Collectibles & Editions
The vast majority of used books, like any other product, lose value over time. I could never hope to sell my Penguin Classics edition of Plutarch’s Moralia for more than half of what I paid for it two years ago when it was new. The same is true for all my books.
Or rather, almost all of them. I have a copy of Cyrano’s Voyages to the Moon & Sun from the Folio Society that is actually worth $150 more than what I paid for it last year. It’s not because the book is especially well-made and pleasing to read, although it is; it’s because Folio Society editions are limited, and people collect them.1 The Folio Cyrano went out of print not long after I bought mine, and now the price for a used copy is twice the original MSRP.
The same, theoretically, could be true of book NFTs. Again, scarcity doesn’t work for digital books like it does for paper ones: if my Cyrano was just a PDF, I could make as many copies as I wanted. But if my book came with an NFT certifying that my digital copy was part of a limited run, it might have some collectible value, in the same way that a rare first edition of A Christmas Carol costs $75,000 but a common used paperback with the same content might cost 75¢.
As the NFT art market has shown, the scarcity produced by blockchains actually does drive up value, with people paying thousands and millions of dollars for the right to own an “original” jpeg or GIF. However, I was only able to find a few enterprising sellers on OpenSea minting NFT “first editions” of classics like Little Women. As of this writing, they have no sales. Crypto guys, apparently, don’t read classics.
Bundling & Unbundling
But why stop at collecting whole editions of books? One thing you see in the crypto-book sphere is unbundling: breaking books apart into individual components that can be minted as NFTs and sold. Authors can sell the original files of chapters, pages, illustrations, and more, opening up new markets for middle-class collectors. There’s a historical analogue here to the market for illuminated manuscripts and incunabula in the 1940s and 1950s, when books were hacked apart into single pages that could be sold at prices middle-class collectors could afford. I can’t afford an original In Praise of Folly wrapped in vellum or blockchain, but I could afford a page or two to put on my wall.
Authors can use this to creatively distribute their books: imagine auctioning off the pages of your book to fans as a way of subsidizing the work, much like artists on Patreon or Go Fund Me offer deluxe packages for supporters. As with other crypto assets, these could even be a kind of investment: an author might issue pages of their book like stocks: have your broker scoop up twenty pages of the new Stephen King and watch as your percentage of the profits roll in.
One crypto author, Rex Shannon, even tried page-bundling as a kind of serialization, minting 207 NFTs for each page of his novel, releasing the pages to the public as fans bought them up. This could work. But so far, it hasn’t. Shannon sold about twenty pages before interest faded, and the novel has languished for more than six months now without another buyer. Less than a tenth of the book has been purchased.
Advertising
We can go further, though: if real estate is the original non-fungible good, why not bring real estate to the pages of your book? An author could establish a blank, programmable space inside their work, open to whoever buys the NFT associated with that space. We could bring the advertising model of broadcast television to literature: most of us pay nothing in exchange for sitting through an occasional word from the sponsors, ideally tailored to meet the demographics of the readers: consumer technology for the sci-fi crowd, psychics peddling their services between the chapters of ghost stories, hospitality & tourism boards buying up space in travel books or adventure tales, political candidates sending out their message in books on politics. Why let algorithmic chum-factory ads clog up books when the author can sell the space to someone at a price they set and directly profit from instead?
And as soon as the advertiser gets bored or senses the market diminishing, they might sell their token on to somebody else, who inherits the space and the right to do as they please with it.
Native Advertising
Then again, what’s to stop advertisers from buying access to the actual text? Native advertising, in which sponsors dictate what characters wear, drive, eat, or drink, has long been a feature of movies, television, video games, and music. With a little bit of coding, you might sell certain semantic fields–clothes, food, transportation, sports teams–to the highest bidder, whose rights are enshrined in a blockchain-distributed smart contract.
The Coca-Cola Corporation could buy up Harry Potter’s drinking rights, so that the Boy Who Lived only drinks refreshing Cherry Coke Zero; James Bond could put down his rusty old Walther PPK and become a Smith & Wesson man; Turkish Delight is banned from Narnia, and now Edmund sells his soul for a Snickers. Once the NFT is sold, the new holder is free to change it as they please, with some artificial intelligence presumably smoothing out the details within the text when Harry Potter suddenly switches to Dr. Pepper.
Nothing stops advertisers from doing this now, except for artistic integrity and the current book distribution model, which would make it hard to alter text once it goes out into the world. But these are easily fixed if the right market models are designed.
Avatars
But native advertising misses the truly radical potential of combining NFTs and text-rights. Why stop at consumer goods and products, when an author can potentially sell NFT-embedded rights to characters, locations, and events? You could buy the location rights and have the story unfold in your hometown, with the hero living in your house. You could buy the naming rights to a side character, the name of the evil alien antagonists. You could buy out the skin colors and sexual orientations of characters, with text-editing AI smoothing out the language to match the changes.
The real money, though, will be in the rights to the characters themselves. Why not let an intrepid buyer simply insert themselves into the book? Avatars, after all, are essential to the Web3 experience. Brands like Dolce & Gabana and Nike2 have already made their first forays into customizing digital avatars; why not sell the protagonist rights to somebody, so that the owner of that NFT can have their avatar (dressed, of course, in their Dolce & Gabana NFT couture) going on adventures, falling in love, and having novel-worthy experiences. Just as movies and video games will slowly merge through the 21st century, so that we can plug our avatars into the latest blockbusters we’ll make our favorite authors rich by purchasing our way into their art.
Our books will finally, truly, become reflections of the most important, meaningful, relevant, vital topic that draws us into literature, keeps us reading it, and makes us want to pay so much money for it: a literature all about ourselves. And it’ll be exactly the kind of literature that we deserve.
I have a vexed relationship to the Folio Society and other luxury presses. I adore well-made books and big, fancy editions of important literature, but there’s something weird (definitely foolish, possibly immoral) in spending hundreds of dollars on, say, one play by Shakespeare when you can get a Folger Library copy with the exact same text for three bucks. I have, a few times, given in when it’s a book that I especially adore in a particularly unique, satisfying presentation, as in the case with the Cyrano; and it helps further that there just aren’t very many decently-printed versions of the Aldington translation, which is the only readable one in English. Also, Quentin Blake illustrations throughout.
That’s the company Dolce & Gabana and the company Nike, not Dolce & Gabana & Nike, though it’s getting increasingly hard to tell designer fashion from sportswear these days.