3 ms·

To me the most promising area of blockchains in publishing is NFTs. The author only spends a couple sentences on them: NFTs, or something similar implemented w

by lacker 5y ago

To me the most promising area of blockchains in publishing is NFTs. The author only spends a couple sentences on them: NFTs, or something similar implemented without blockchain, may be an interesting niche market, but I don’t see how it could revolutionize publishing. As of today, it looks like many creators who try NFTs don’t earn even a penny. A lot of revolutions happen when a niche gets bigger and bigger until eventually it's really big. It's pretty early for NFTs and they seem more likely to revolutionize the art market than the publishing market, but these don't seem like great criticisms of NFTs to me. It's small now, and most creators can't make money on NFTs, but those same criticisms would apply to any of the past revolutions in publishing before they happened. There's just so little funding right now for areas like short fiction. Is it really so unthinkable that NFTs could become the primary funding source for it? Or that in the future something like "new meme development" could become an important, profitable type of publishing, whereas now we just assume that it's done for free. To be fair, I do think it's more likely that Substack revolutionizes publishing than that NFTs revolutionize publishing, but I think they both have a shot.

dangoor 5y ago
I view NFTs as enabling "digital collectibles". NFTs for art is an extension of the fact that there have been art collectors for ages. There _are_ book collectors, but that's a tiny subset of publishing. For authors who regularly publish short fiction, I'd imagine the patronage model (Patreon) to be a bigger deal than NFTs. Maybe it's a lack of vision, but I just don't see a lot of people wanting to be able to claim "I own the first edition of Story X by Author Y."
- lacker 5y ago
  Patreon or Kickstarter does seem better for things like a short story. NFTs might make more sense for ultra-short fiction, like something the length of a single funny tweet. Because you can't really sell that on a Patreon, but maybe you could NFT it. But yeah like any of these not-yet-existent things, it probably won't happen.

by lacker 5y ago

dangoor 5y ago

I view NFTs as enabling "digital collectibles". NFTs for art is an extension of the fact that there have been art collectors for ages. There _are_ book collectors, but that's a tiny subset of publishing. For authors who regularly publish short fiction, I'd imagine the patronage model (Patreon) to be a bigger deal than NFTs. Maybe it's a lack of vision, but I just don't see a lot of people wanting to be able to claim "I own the first edition of Story X by Author Y."

lacker 5y ago
Patreon or Kickstarter does seem better for things like a short story. NFTs might make more sense for ultra-short fiction, like something the length of a single funny tweet. Because you can't really sell that on a Patreon, but maybe you could NFT it. But yeah like any of these not-yet-existent things, it probably won't happen.