With Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), a huge asset tokenization industry emerged. These include the tokenization of real estate, national currencies, airline tickets and documents related to citizens' identity, among others.

In recent years, non fungible tokens (NFTs) have enabled digital artists around the world to monetize their works. Although the volume of sales has decreased dramatically, has proven its utility. We have a big chance!

In the field of literature, tokenization delivers big benefits for the literary, poetry and scientific documents. Thanks to the immutability and traceability offered by blockchain, authors will be able to innovate in the publication of their work.

On the other hand, libraries, which in many cases manage their literary assets with obsolete processes, can now integrate distributed record books to democratize knowledge.

As a result of the immutability of the blockchain and services such as Arweave or the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), now it's possible to safeguard any literary work without the fear of it being lost due to political pressures or "cultural revolutions", which arise from time to time due to absolutist ideas.

I must say that t² is also a great platform for preserving our words, and its integration with Lens Protocol and Arweave makes it a beautiful option for writing and meeting other writers.

According to Cristóbal Oyarzún, Web3 advisor, "the best way to immortalize thoughts is to tokenizing them. Even better is to tokenizing literature and poetry, which are one of the noblest ways of sharing thoughts, emotions, sensations and feelings."

He also remarked that "tokenizing poetry is an act of rebellion like poetry itself because it is a disruptive, courageous, risky and innovative act".

Tokenizing literature: advantages and disadvantages

Like any new development linked to technological innovations, this trend to tokenize literature offers some benefits as well as disadvantages.

Benefits

  • There are no major intermediaries, except for NFT marketplaces.
  • Decentralization allows the purchase and distribution of books from anywhere in the world, and the profits go directly to the writer. This is very relevant when you know that a significant percentage of sales go to publishing houses, platforms like Amazon, printers, companies that distribute the physical book and bookstores.
  • Being immutable, there is no way for the text to be lost or censored by abusive and undemocratic political decisions.
  • The holder or buyer becomes the real owner of a version of the book, which can be traded.
  • The document is securely safeguarded in services such as IPFS and the blockchain.
  • Publishing costs are very low and it is becoming easier and easier to create an NFT.
  • The writer can develop a community around his work, by designing different utilities for his collection and generating co-creation dynamics.
  • He can publish in parallel in different formats, or sell the tokenized book as a crowdfunding model to then self-publish on paper.

Disadvantages

  • Blockchain technology is relatively new and its use may generate some uncertainty.
  • People may not understand or possess the knowledge to purchase an NFT.
  • The market for blockchain-based books is very small, which may limit the potential audience for a book. But we can change that!
  • The lack of intermediaries may mean less support for marketing and promotion of the work.

How to tokenize a book

Readl is built on Polygon's blockchain and offers an interesting catalog, including some free classic works. Here, anyone can release their book in EPUB format. Singular is a NFT marketplace that allows you to mint PDF documents, specifically on the Moonbeam blockchain, Polkadot's parachain.

On Readl and Singular, there are no barriers to launch an NFT book other than owning a wallet, creating the collection and uploading the file, in a process that requires the payment of very low fees.

Bluez, the NFT marketplace (Astar Network) allows the minting of an NFT book through its Launchpad. There, users can find the books of two Chileans.

One of them is MacZam, recognized for his contribution to the Polkadot and Web3 community, who published "DEFI ON ASTAR NETWORK", a book written for all those who want to approach decentralized finance.

The other Chilean author is me. Thanks to Matt and the Bluez development team, I was able to release 1904, the first poetry book, both in Spanish and English, in the Astar ecosystem.

It's not a big deal - I'll tell you more about 1904 in another post - but I'm grateful for the opportunity they gave us to develop the option to tokenize an NFT and open a path for the tokenization of literature.

Tokenized libraries

A use case for maintaining libraries with blockchain is the Cabildo de Tenerife, Spain, which announced in 2018 the implementation in libraries of an experimental authentication system based on this technology.

The objective is to guarantee secure and private access to the IT resources of libraries, as well as to solve the problems derived to the authorization of requests by people with legal limitations or with restricted capacity of representation.

At the time, the Councilor for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Information Society, Félix Fariña, commented that "the concept of community provided by blockchain technology is very strong and we could generate a reliable and secure community of users".

During the same year, the National Archives of the United Kingdom announced the use of blockchain technology to preserve the authenticity of its digital records, through the ARCHANGEL project.

The UK Archive seeks to maintain unalterable digital records and prevent possible manipulation. In the official document, it is detailed that Archives and Memory Institutions (AMI) are the lens through which future generations will perceive the present, as they constitute the authoritative economic, social and cultural memory of a nation.

Archival practice is ill-equipped to meet the socio-technical challenges posed by today's digital age in terms of backing up data. For the same reason, blockchain is a nice solution.

And what about scientific publications?

DeSci represent a radical shift in the paradigm of scientific research that fosters a more open, collaborative and democratic science. In the field of publications, deScier offers a decentralized scientific journal: The DeSci Journal. By using the blockchain, the copyright belongs 100% to the researchers.

Maria Goreti Freitas, leader of deScier, details that "it is up to us to build a solution and offer an alternative for authors to publish their works in a fair way: keeping 100% of their copyrights and considering their work as digital assets in a win-win shared economy."

In Mushroom Protocol, our Latin American Web3 platform that links the blockchain world with biotechnology (you can read more about Mushroom here) we also want to offer scientists a decentralized way to safeguard their research.

On our platform, we hope to deliver the highest security for your data, with the possibility to share this information with other scientists and thus open the way to more decentralized science.