Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Dylan, and online I go by epicdylan or T. Dylan Daniel, depending on how official I want to sound at the moment. I've studied a lot of things, done research in various sciences, philosophy, and the publishing industry. And I'm working on my Ph.D in experimental psychology at Texas Tech University's cognition & cognitive neuroscience program. I love a deep conversation with an engaged and interested mind, and I feel passionately that open source software is a powerful solution to many of the world's communication problems.
Q: Share a bit about yourself. Are you a writer, reader, artist, or technologist? What draws you to the world of publishing and creativity?
A: I'm a bit of all of the above! My reading skills are definitely by far the strongest of the four listed, but I pride myself on writing as well as I can and building software. I sometimes paint, somewhat more frequently draw or write poetry, and most frequently of all I play music and write songs. I'm in the world of publishing because I love books so much I couldn't help but explore the rabbit hole of a world from which they come.
I love publishing and creativity because they provide the basis for a shared space different people's minds can inhabit. We can make jokes together, invent things together, and ponder our existence together. And it's better with others involved. So there's this broad conversation about literally everything you could be interested in and all you have to do is be creative and participate by reading and writing. I don't honestly know what else I would really choose to do with my time!
Q: What solutions do you hope to see in the publishing industry?
A: I'm hoping to see very low-cost decentralized technologies available to everyone. The sorts of things we have today can be bought and manipulated, spun down, or liquidated. Content can be manipulated, authenticity is sometimes extremely difficult to verify, and in general nothing that should be transparent is actually transparent. The technology is available today to completely change the way people write, preserve, and consume literature. I want to see the publishing industry adopt these new tools, streamline their business models, and reach more users with better products.
Q: Discuss any challenges you've encountered or observed in traditional publishing. What changes or innovations would you like to see implemented?
A: I've always had a hard time finding things I wanted to read. Doing research at the level I do either costs a lot of money or involves building swiss cheese models that have many blind spots and holes in them. The best part of being a student at a major university is that you can get access to a lot of literature for free, but even so, my science is frequently impeded by the difficulty and/or expense involved in retrieving certain assets. I'd love to see everyone in the world guaranteed access to a persistent decentralized content network with real-time financial capabilities and deep IP/provenance/privacy protections. We'll have to put a lot of thought in, and then we'll have to do a lot of work, but a very powerful system could be built today to manage every bit of this task onchain using free, open source software.
Q: What issues do you believe exist for writers, readers, and creatives today? Highlight specific obstacles or concerns faced by creatives in the current landscape. This could include topics like intellectual property rights, fair compensation, censorship, or community engagement.
A: IP is expensive to manage and slow, international enforcement of royalties is very weak the smaller your name is, and it's very difficult for new authors to gain access to readers. Compensation tracks success but tends to lag substantially and involve an absurd amount of fees paid to distributors and other early-stage literature speculators. And speculative markets are subject to boom and bust cycles.
With the advent of the printing press, the net marginal cost of creating a new book plummeted and people everywhere gained access to literature at a level and rate no one had ever seen before. The ebook has had a similar impact, but its lack of financial rails means that centralized massive entities manage access to most ebook content. If digital books could be properly decentralized, they could become durable assets. These digital commodities could be transacted any number of ways and there are of course about ten billion different ideas for social engagement onchain between fans of a particular work of literature.
I guess if I want to sum this up succinctly, I think people involved with literature today have 2 big problems: they don't control the digital distribution of their work, and they have to pay too much to access the markets where the work is distributed.
