Business models

Blockchain in Publishing: The Simultaneity of Becoming

When a publication gets empowered by blockchain technology, one can truly say that a reader never steps into the same book twice. Blockchain enables internet-published content to emulate life itself — both the perceived (the content), and the perceivers (publishers and readers) — in a recorded environment that captures and publishes a constant state of content change. Blockchain’s insubstantial, tick-tock, software soul can record every state change from any source: thought-paths of the perceivers, context, or assigned or imputed value (list price, contract price, royalties, subsidiary rights price, etc.).

Because blockchain content lives on no one server, and in fact immediately self-distributes its change ledger — if not itself — to the servers of those who access or perceive each of its “genesis blocks” of content, that content cannot be erased, corrupted, or otherwise compromised. Infinitely expandable is blockchain, enabling and dynamically encrypting online change transactions to each genesis block of content.

This simultaneity of becoming liberates us all from traditional, sequential and analog production processes, familiar from the days of print. On the blockchain, content creation, editing, designing, formatting, peer reviewing, aggregating, correcting, recombining, archiving, blurbing, reading and rereading, collecting, sharing and recommending, all can happen in an unheard of, incremental simultaneity whose trail is accretive in nature. And your unique identity, the state change you make to any given content chunk, and the time and place of your change, are all recorded forever! But relax. All is not digits! Blockchain-based content, if so enabled by its creator, can take on tangible forms as well, such as a paper book, ebook, or even an aerobook birthed from a 3-D printer. Lots to look forward to!

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