RE: Say Hello To DBooks: A Book Publishing Platform On STEEM - Publish Your Books And Earn.
I have two questions which concern me out of the gate:
Firstly, how do you intend to overcome the "can only be rewarded for seven days" problem when it comes to books? Is the assumption that content will be episodic in the sense of old-school pulp novels which were published serially? If not, then it definitely begs the question of how will books be rewarded after any content in them has been posted for seven days?
Secondly, in the backend, is it just interpreting Markdown for presentation? Is there any chance that we can get Fountain added as an option for those of us who don't necessarily write prose but screenplay format instead, and still want attractive output formatting?
Of the two questions, the first is obviously much larger and important..
As a writer/self publisher, I would also caution against putting real books on here. All of the bookstores (Kindle/Apple/Nook, etc) frown on books being available anywhere off their bookstore cheaper than it is on theirs. This would not be something anyone looking to make residuals long term with their writing would participate in if I am understanding this correctly. Amazon has crawlers scouring the net constantly looking for books on their platform listed elsewhere cheaper.
Even if you intend to demand that you retain distribution rights (which are in your control before you ascribe them to anyone else), the long-term reward architecture is something you absolutely need to be aware of before you decide to put anything on a public blockchain. Unlike most distribution mechanisms, you have no control over the presence or absence of it at any point going forward.
As long as one node exists of the blockchain, your work is forever immortalized and you cannot revoke it.
For most authors at this point, publishing directly to Amazon is probably, overall, a better outlet. At least for pretty much any form of non-serialized fiction. While serialized neo-pulp stories do see publication through Amazon, it can be very difficult to maintain public interest for such content because Amazon really doesn't have the architecture to maintain communities.
Though, honestly, given the questions about how long-term rewards can possibly be apportioned, you might be better off – as a new, unsigned writer who is looking to be published – self-publishing your work through Amazon (which is terribly easy, truthfully) and building your community wherever it is that you can find a following.
If that happens to be on Steemit, awesome. If it's anywhere else, you might want to look into something like Flattr, which doesn't have quite the complex management issue of Steemit, or going truly aggressively into Patreon.
Being an untested writer is a hard row to hoe, and honestly unless you feel absolutely compelled to be a writer to the exclusion of doing things far more sensible, I can't really suggest it. I'm not sure that there are any public blockchain architectures that would really work well with book publishing because of the issue of complete lack of ongoing control over the content once it's been posted.
For new folks, this might not seem like a big deal. Maybe it's not. But it will be one day if you're successful.
We have a feature in the pipeline called book locking... Which means that once you're done publishing your book on dbooks you can lock your book from public viewing. Then people would have to pay a rental fee set by the writer to access said content.
Of course the content would still be available for free on steemit but would lack the organization and ease of read we offer
We would really love to have you on our discord group, so we can discuss new features at length
You do know that nobody wants to rent books, right? This is a publication methodology that has been tried before – and ultimately just ends up encouraging people to find ways to transfer what is purely text content into a more distributable, useful format.
In fact, for anyone that cares, DRM might as well not even exist right now.
If there's one thing that we've learned about book publication (and if we're honest, any form of media), it's that if it is possible to acquire something more conveniently than piracy for a few dollars, people will do it – but DRM puts a speed bump there, making piracy far more attractive.
If the content is still available for free on Steemit, then that's definitely not going to be a great thing.
And you conveniently skated to the side to avoid my question about how books will be rewarded after the seven day Steemit posting. Instead, you've brought up a new question:
You've decided to take on two methods of distribution simultaneously, both of which seem to have fairly inherently superior advantages. PDFs and e-books are easy to generate from content, especially content already largely marked up with Markdown. Steemit already provides voting rewards without giving up a 20% cut to you guys, just from straight posting. What are you offering that is better than the current options in self publication for longform content?
I think I'd rather have this discussion here than Discord, where other people who may be interested can see it in context and it is nowhere near as ephemeral.
These are the questions that serious writers need the answers to.
Okay..
I really love your points raised. A second option that has been discussed is making the 20% we get from posts serve as a monthly reward pool which will be shared amongst writers based on the percentage of the overall total reads generated by their articles on the platform during the course said month.
That would be a better way to provide writers with long term sustainable income. We really appreciate your criticisms and I must assure you that most of these issues have crossed our minds
We're going to provide writers with as many options as possible to generate sustainable income and they can choose their own poisons
However, these are still early days for us and we would need all the help and funds (the initial purpose of the 20%) we can get to develop the product properly
We're taking things 1 step at a time.
After the first couple of months, this is going to be heavily weighted toward those with established presence on the platform and almost none of it is going to go to newcomers, and that's the way it's going to be until you shut down the project.
Now, that might be exactly what you want, but from the perspective of someone who is coming along later, they have almost no chance of competing in the midterm with those who already have an established presence. You are basically holding them in with the hope that they will be someone who is recognized as a creator within this niche in coming cycles.
You have effectively, philosophically, re-created "publish or perish" as well as a system which simultaneously rewards simply having been on the platform the longest. I am not sure that was entirely your intention.
Also, you immediately open yourself to be the target of some sort of distributed bot "reading" swarm, given that you are going to distribute that 20% by "reads." If I can buy up votes on the blockchain, I can most certainly buy "reads" for the same distribution mechanism.
It's hard to get away from the multilevel marketing whiff coming off of this. After all, let's consider the degenerate case in which no books are voted up for a month. There will be no 20% to take. It doesn't matter how established the writer is, they get nothing. Now let's consider the case where the number of people publishing books on the system triples, but the number of consumer and consumer-hours does not. In that period, each view becomes worth effectively 1/3 of what it was before. Unless the amount of the 20% taken can grow faster than the number of people who want to be involved in the system by a good amount, it becomes more advantageous for those already in to keep people out in order to protect their rewards.
You've just reimplemented a reward pool that mimics the same failure modes as the Steemit reward pool. It just keys often easier mechanism to automate.
Unfortunately, you need to do more than minimum viable product to have a successful rollout. You have to have a system built in theory which actually does what you say you want it to do. It needs to be resistant to exploitation by automation, because we already know that sort of exploitation exists on the platform we've got. It needs to not set up mechanics which actively incentivize bad actor behavior. It needs to decide what it wants to do before you start implementing anything.
I realize that the "don't think, go fast, fail fast" process is popular in Silicon Valley circles, but I've always been fond of replacing that whole architecture with "don't fail."
For me, as a writer who is already published, I need some kind of understanding of the theoretical underpinning of how it's all supposed to work devoid of handwaving, and which reflects a fair amount of consideration about my experience as a user, to be the kind of person that gets on board this sort of thing.
I may not be the kind of user you're targeting. You may be looking for the people who are just looking for a lighter weight, less promising vanity press. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but if so you probably need to really lean heavily on what advantages your system will provide over what already exists on Amazon and Google Books – and if you can't answer those questions, find some answers to them.
There are a lot of ways for independent authors to self publish these days, ones in which they retain most of the rights of distribution going forward after publication. You have to compete with those.
I think the 20% distribution is actually a valid strategy. It doesn't have to be based on views.. could be based on likes too. It would be the same thing as Steem extending the voting rewards from 7 days to like a year we'll say. The only difference is that it's capped at rewarding only 20% and not the full portion of money.
Besides Steemit, DTube seems to be the most popular steem-based app right now. But with your argument, they too fall to the demise of the 7 day cap. Great video content takes as much effort to produce as anything else.
I think the real issue is with Steem. Steem misses out on a lot of use-cases by limiting us with a 7 day reward pool. One solution would be, when they release the ability for people to create their own tokens, to also be able to choose a time limit for rewards.
With that said, I agree with what you say, and I think DBooks suffers this problem at a much greater length. Also, the design of the MVP is very weak (a bookshelf as the background???).
I will say that fundamentally, the idea of DBooks is pretty interesting. If we were to imagine the centralized version of it, it would be like Scribd.
Thanks for your insights. You've raised very cogent points which we will seriously consider and discuss at length to better improve our business model
Thank you very much
We're really committed to this project and would love it to be fair, just & self sustaining for as long as possible
We really appreciate these criticisms and we would take them as constructive.
You've made very valid points. We are going to re-strategize and come up with answers to these honest concerns of yours and I'm sure others will share the same.
If the reward pool system based on views seems flawed, what do you think about a voting system like what we have in steem witnesses?
You've shared your concerns, we've listened. Now we would love to listen to suggestions if you have any. I truly appreciate your inputs, it just goes to show you care and you're passionate about what you love.
You do realize that the voting system that we have in steem witnesses is functionally identical to the voting system that we have to slice up the reward pool, right?
That is to say, it literally depends and scales based upon the amount of vests in your account. It is not, contrary to some popular belief, simply a straight "number of votes" voting system. Like everything else that ultimately uses rshares under the hood, it's all Proof of Stake.
That would actually be no change at all.
Honestly, the best suggestion I can offer you is "don't do that." You are effectively asking me "what's the best way to drive this screw with a hammer?" The tool you're bringing to bear on the problem is the wrong tool for the job.
Among the mismatches the fact that steem is a public blockchain and every single transaction which occurs on it is public runs directly counter to the aims of your project, which is to control access to content. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
At heart, beyond the public versus private dichotomy, you have a problem which will always exist for the steem blockchain as it is constituted and designed from the ground up: content older than five days old cannot be given value. That's a hard limit. It would require at minimum a hardfork to fix, and you might be surprised how many things under the hood might break as a result.
These are the two biggest problems and that there really aren't suggestions or solutions to them. They are quintessential.
If you want to establish a distribution network/publisher based on a public blockchain, and especially this public blockchain, those of the big hurdles.
And that sucks, but it's the nature of the world. I think you have picked the wrong project.
You would be better off rereading hardfork 20 and what it's going to bring to the platform and start putting together an interface which will take advantage of the opportunities for curation of content that is being posted anyway, possibly taking as inspiration Utopian.io and publications on Medium. If you can get a prime seat at the table for that, focusing on literary content, you may have an operable project.
About the Publishing formats.
I hope you understand that this is a Minimum Viable Product. It might take up to a month, if not more to get to the Beta stage
And most of our workflow and methods would probably evolve over time.
Currently, nothing is set in stone. Our work has only just begun
"Minimum Viable Product" does nothing to make my author's ears perk up. You might review what @lextenebris has talked about. I'd say "discussed" but your only contribution to this has been what is essentially hand-waving.
If you would like authors to really look at your product, you should have more than a bare skeleton of what you're going to do.
I suspect that those aspiring to Silicon Valley-style development arcs may have an entirely different idea of what "viable" means than people who actually have to use products.
Out here, "viable" means that something actually has to work. It has to be fit for purpose.
This may be asking too much.
@lextenebris has helped us a lot to see things from a different angle. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that says one has to have an answer to every question raised. I feel it is ok at some point to press the pause button and further research the subject matter, then come back with an appropriate response.
We would work on the idea and bring out a product with more flesh on it. Your suggestions are also welcome.
Yeah there are big problems here. It's going to be people writing the same garbage posts that are insular steemit issues, publishing them as a book, and raking in whatever incentives are given for views by offering it for free instead of renting it out.
Just like short books on Amazon have been pushed to $.99, people will offer Dbooks for free, and renting will be a dinosaur as soon as its born. No one will write a real book exclusively for this platform, they will write "Trending" tripe in serial form and publish it.
This blockchain was built for social media. High turnover content. It's not made for residuals, and I think books would be forced.
I think energy would be far better spent building a marketplace to sell books for Steem or maybe even Delegations. That's the end goal, right? Selling books for Steem/SBD/SteemPower. That's what this is, so do it directly. Have a marketplace where someone can send a pre-determined amount and a memo to an account in return for a unique download/access code for the book. Automate the transaction with SteemConnect.
Of course, that's just a specific instance of the more general problem of "we need a proper storefront interface for doing business using steem/SDB as a currency," which is a problem that you would've thought the developers at Steemit Inc. would have wanted to get out the door on about day five, since the idea of a currency that no one takes in exchange for anything is a little silly.
The problem with selling any kind of media these days is proceeding under the assumption that it can't/won't be immediately pirated, and for good reasons.
I would love to have some kind of solution which would reward people for writing evergreen content; there is entirely too much focus on creating for the ephemeral and ignoring the idea that you might want to produce something that is useful and rewarded outside of an extremely narrow time slice. But you can't do that with the steem blockchain. There's no advantage to doing so and no system by which it would be worthwhile to do so.
I suspect that if there is a desire for curated, serialized fiction or nonfiction in a blockchain context, that particular itch will be scratched when hardfork 20 comes out with communities, which themselves can be run like a curated publication, accept submissions, only re-steem/publish the pieces that they decide are worthwhile, and get their money from the curation of a specific type of content while the authors get their money from the up votes. It means that authors can't get rewarded after a week, even if a new reader discovers them, unless they're constantly producing content, which is going to be self-limiting in a number of ways – but odds are it will work better than what we see on the table here.
I'm just trying to find a use case that works for DBooks and I'm just not finding it.
yea. maybe we need editors for this kind of books
Yes, you hit it, an online bookstore built on blockchain, where authors make money showcasing and advertising their books though upvote and at the same time sell the book for interested parties