NFT Books - Book Token Platform

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We're creating a marketplace for NFT eBooks and audiobooks. Readers can buy and sell. Authors and publishers get a % of the secondary sale in perpetuity. Readers earn $BOOK token as they read.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

C-Level team previously built an eBook company that had 6M readers and 2M+ eBook titles. We worked with thousands of publishers and imprints including all Big 5 publishers. We delivered ebooks in bulk deals to Google, Apple, IBM, T-Mobile, Wall Street Journal, and General Mills.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Book Token will create a digital book marketplace and exchange where anyone can collect, read and then resell what they buy - just like print books. Harnessing NFTs on Cardano, we are creating a decentralized ecosystem that allows readers to finally own their digital books. When readers consume their books, they will be rewarded in our native token $BOOK, which we are calling knowledge mining (a read-to-earn system). 

This ecosystem unlocks new revenue opportunities for authors and publishers to make money in perpetuity on ongoing sales, setting up smart contracts to pay themselves, charities, and other social impact organizations. 

The Path Forward

In a very short amount of time, the Book Token team has created what we're calling DEAs - Decentralized Encrypted Assets. This allows for the whole book asset to be stored decentrally, with the NFT metadata giving instructions on how to store both public info and encrypted private IP. In the publishing world, there are a lot of DRM concerns, so protecting IP is a large concern (as it should be).

This allows for a reader to hold an NFT in a wallet, come to the Book Token reader, and read the book without any login once they connect their wallet. I think it is important to note that this is our minimally viable product. The first stage in our roadmap is to fully decentralize the book (asset). The last stage is an autonomous key management dApp and fully decentralized reader.

Starting this in July 2022, people will be able to collect, read, and resell Book NFTs on Cardano!

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

The mass market, readers & publishers, don’t understand and are fearful of blockchain technology. However, unlocking the utility of Cardano for this market on an easy-to-use platform can lead to onboarding hundreds of millions of readers and billions of dollars in digital assets.

Building true utility through the power of the Cardano blockchain will onboard massive amounts of new users in the community as readers begin to demand ownership of their digital assets. The following impact is inevitable:

• Digital books become individual and unique assets that add scarcity and inventory control
• Readers own, instead of license, their digital books and can resell them in an open market
• Publishers & Authors receive royalties on all future second-hand sales
• Ability to create collective versions, limited editions, and nearly infinite marketing combinations
• Ability to bundle physical print books with book NFTs
• Ability to partner with brands for bulk distribution
• Increased security and digital rights management
• Publishers & Authors will be able to anonymously market to anyone who holds or has owned, particular titles
• Ability to verify reading with radically change education

For a deeper dive with our CEO, watch this interview on Learn Cardano:

Take a journey on a clickable design prototype:

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Through our conversations with some of the top publishing houses in the world, we’ve discovered that there is already a growing demand from authors to have access to book NFTs. Our main concern at this moment is development resources to continue to stay on target and hit milestones in a timely manner.

Other than that, we have been moving faster than anticipated with a small team. At this point, we employ 5 different law firms to help us navigate publishing contracts, NFT transactional legalities in the United States and abroad, and tax law for a secondary market that has never existed.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

NOW

V0.1 MVP with Decentralized Encrypted Assets (DEAs). - Finished

--- Mainnet Launch---!!! 7.20.22 !!!

----------------------------------------------

Q3

V0.2 - Early September

Smart Contract Builder Page

• Ability to input book metadata and ePub content
• Assign Transitive Royalties to different wallets
• Ability to charge a credit card to pay the minting fee (fiat rails/ Stripe Integration)
• NFTs are then stored in a Users Bookshelf/Wallet

Q4

V0.3 - Late October

Ability to transfer the book from one wallet address to another (inside platform)

• Address + QR code generation

V0.5 - November

Basic Book Exchange

• User can post a book for sale on an exchange for an amount

V0.6 - December

Book Release Function

• User can list a book for its initial sale

V0.7 - December

Basic Mobile App

• User can login
• User can access Bookshelf
• User can open book in Opensource Reader
• User can transfer books using QR code to another wallet

Q1 2023

V0.8

Advanced reader functionality

• Highlights, Notes, etc

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Legal, Accounting & Tax Team ($750-$1500/ hour) X 30 hours = $33,375

Outsourced Quality Assurance Engineer ($85 hour) x 85 hours = $7,225

Outsourced Front-End Developer ($125 hour) X 90 hours = $11,250

Outsourced Mobile Engineer ($125 hour) X 75 hours = $9,375

Contract Business Development/ Publisher Relations ($150 hour) X 60 hours = $9,000

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Joshua Stone, CEO & Co-founder | Josh has been in Publishing Technology since 2009. Josh will run point on design, product development, and all day-to-day business activities.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshualeestone/

Ben Illian, Co-founder | Ben has been leading the charge on partnering with publishers, which already includes 3 of the Big 5 publisher and several smaller publishing houses. It’s imperative to explain blockchain and NFT technologies to the publishing industry. These conversations are to create interest and discuss contracts to have access to their robust catalogs.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benillian/

RJ Regenold, CTO | RJ has 20+ years of software engineering experience and advanced knowledge in Haskell. RJ will lead technical development and lead our outsourced dev team.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rj-regenold-32007821/

Bob Wright, Chief Legal Officer | Bob is head partner at Wright Connaster Law Firm in Dallas, TX. He has started and sold several tech companies, and has been in the tech space since the 1990s. Bob handles the plethora of legal teams we work with from LA to the Cayman Islands.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-wright-560219/ 

Banking: Silicon Valley Bank

Outsourced Legal: Morrison Foerster

Accounting & Tax: Deloitte

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Hard to answer. I guess my gut instinct is "I hope not." I believe we can get to profitability with the lean, efficient team we have built.

If we were to come back, I believe it would be when we had a better understanding of our cost per acquisition, and our lifetime value per reader. It would be strictly for marketing dollars to scale quickly without having to go to venture capital firms.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

A report with the following KPIs will be produced, and shared, at EOM:

KPIs

• Number of weekly commits
• Number of sales
• Number of NFTs minted
• Total Website Traffic
• Ave. Purchase Value
• ebook
• audiobook
• Number of Secondary Sales
• % of Sales in secondary markets
• Cost per acquisition
• Ongoing LifeTime Value
• Ave. CPC
• Ave. CPM on Ad Buys
• Number of total wallets
• Number of publisher contracts
• Number of independent authors
• % of mobile users
• % of desktop uses

We will also create a Trello board specifically for any auditors, and schedule monthly calls to go over budgets, recent builds, and discuss new any new publishing partnerships.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Creating the key underlying technical foundation to create a marketplace for creating, selling, and reading book NFTs for publishers and therefore, the P2P market, with smart contracts controlling transitive royalties. At this point, we have 8 publishers and thousands of titles, ready to go live to sell NFT Books.

True long-term success will be to onboard the hundreds of millions of readers onto an easy-to-use platform that allows them to finally own and read their digital books. 

We want to decentralize knowledge.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

Entirely new one.