Will books be NFT in the future?

The opportunities offered by NFT could in the future cause a huge change in book publishing 

Authors through the blockchain have greater control over their works and the uses made of them, which would help in the future to make it impossible to create illicit copies of books created as NFTs. Of course, buyers could not only enjoy them but also resell them under the conditions established in the smartcontracts.

As we discussed in a previous article, NFTs have shown an increasing openness to the literature, so it is likely that in the coming years we will see not only authors who want to enter this market, but also publishers who in turn, create a digital marketplace for their books.

Publishers that have taken the first steps with NFTs

In May last year Bookwire announced a blockchain platform for text and audio content, creating a kind of NFTs marketplace for the publishing sector. Bookwire was originally intended for collectors looking for originals, first editions, manuscripts and exclusive audio recordings. 

Another company that saw an opportunity in this market was ABP Publishing, an international audiobook publisher that announced in 2021 its intentions to sell NFTs of its audiobooks.  The company became the first audiobook publisher to publish records on the blockchain network store, currently has more than 500 digital audiobooks in different languages partnership with Audible, Zebralution, Storytel and other digital media distributors.

APB Publishing’s collections have been placed on OpenSea. There users can purchase 2021 bestsellers such as Breath by James Nestor, The Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez and Just Shut Up annd Do It by Brian Tracy.

In February of this year another big launch occurred, the Spanish publisher house Linkgua announced that it would launch around 150 works of classic Hispanic literature as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The collection was called ‘First Folio‘ and it was launched on the Solsea marketplace. Some of the titles that stood out among the digital works were «El Quijote», «Lazarillo de Tormes», and «Bodas de Sangre». This was the publisher’s second approach to the NFTs, since last year it had sold 50 NFTs of the book ‘Paradiso’ by the writer José Lezama Lima.

An expected but controversial change

It is a fact that NFTs are a technology that will be part of many digital processes that take place in our society today. However, there is still a great deal of skepticism and doubts about the future of books, which could be profitable for many authors and publishers, but it is likely that the incursion will be slow and progressive.

There are organizations that point out important challenges to overcome from a technological and legal point of view to make this change possible.Unlike an independent writer, when a publisher wants to create a marketplace with the NFTs of its books, there are important agreements in which authors, publishers, jurists and technical experts in blockchain have to participate in order to respect both the legality and the balance of the interests at stake.