Pioneering the Ecosystem of Tokenized Literary Works and Reader Rewards

Prepare to have your mind expanded and your digital horizons broadened as we sit down with the visionaries from Book.io. They're not just talking the talk; they're revolutionizing the way we own and consume digital literature on the blockchain. From eBooks to audiobooks, discover how you can truly own, trade, and even print your favorite reads. We'll unravel the quirky rivalry with Hoski and the growing ecosystem of NFT projects on Cardano, all while sharing our amusing coffee preferences – because everyone knows a good chat begins with a great cup of joe.

As we sift through the intricate world of digital asset ownership, you'll learn about the delicate interplay of innovation, value creation, and community-focused models. The team at Book.io isn't just building a platform; they're crafting an entire ecosystem where authors continuously earn royalties, and users are rewarded for their thirst for knowledge. We're not just observing the future; we're actively participating in it, from tokenized incentives to a comprehensive marketplace that’s redefining the creator-consumer relationship.

Finally, we're setting the stage for Book.io Con 2024, an event where community, knowledge, and the arts take center stage over profit. Delve into our commitment to preserving media integrity, our ethical approach to publishing, and the vibrant ecosystem that supports both authors and readers alike. We're more than just a podcast; we're a beacon for those who dare to reimagine the landscape of literature and media ownership in the digital age. Join us for this transformative journey – it's one for the books.

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Web3 marketplace for buying, reading, and selling decentralized eBooks and Audiobooks.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome everybody to Cardano Over Coffee. We've got a great show for you today and remember you can join us live on Xspaces Monday through Friday, 9.30 am, Eastern Standard Time, 2.30 pm UTC. We want to give a big thank you to today's show sponsor, Cardano Spot. The Cardano Spot app is building to become the ultimate gateway to the Cardano ecosystem, breaking down barriers with open access articles and the hottest content in over 10 different languages. Download the Cardano Spot app today on Google Play or the App Store and join over 40,000 users on the future of social media powered by Web. 3. Joining us on today's show is the team from Bookio. We're going to talk about everything that they have going on. This is one that you want to tune into.

Speaker 3: 0:50

Oh snacks Bookio that just landed on the shelf and we are so stoked to get down with these absolute loggies.

Speaker 5: 1:07

What up y'all? How are you guys?

Speaker 3: 1:10

What's going on? It's Friday, welcome.

Speaker 6: 1:12

It's Friday, well, it is Friday.

Speaker 7: 1:16

Who's behind the PFB?

Speaker 6: 1:18

It's Ben right now. Josh is actually making his own coffee, which is why he's a little bit late.

Speaker 7: 1:24

Oh, it's a little coffee like snob.

Speaker 6: 1:30

Yeah, josh can be a snob without just about everything. He's in there like three minutes ago. He's sitting there grinding his coffee and I'm like, hey man, you know like we're supposed to be on in like a couple of minutes. He's just sitting over there grinding his coffee and I'm like, all right, here we go. So, anyway, it's great to be here. Thank you for letting me know. It's Friday.

Speaker 7: 1:50

Yes, and thank you for coming. We love having you here. It's been a minute since we had you and I was like hey, so much is going on in that ecosystem. We're going to bring you back.

Speaker 6: 1:59

I know, I can't even remember last time we were on. It feels like last week and also like five years ago.

Speaker 7: 2:06

I totally relate to that. It's like, yeah, it's some weird dimension that we live in this space, but I heard Hoski was speaking. He sounds like he was talking about coffee too, so he wanted to make sure you know that he was here first.

Speaker 8: 2:20

Oh really, I was here first and I just wanted. Did you guys hit 420,000 titles yet? Or are we still beating you guys?

Speaker 6: 2:27

I think you have just that one project with 420,000 NFTs. Okay, right, we have lots of projects. You know we're a platform.

Speaker 8: 2:38

Hoski, so you're trying to tell me that you haven't minted 420,000 NFTs yet?

Speaker 6: 2:43

Not yet, but one of these days, you and I are going to have a very specific space together. When we cross that mark, the 420, 420 space that's coming. That's coming. I would. Every time I see you.

Speaker 9: 2:59

See you guys, like on a board, a chess board. You know, you know mono a mono.

Speaker 7: 3:02

So I like that Mano a mano, well, guys, but honestly, we're just the other day.

Speaker 6: 3:10

like you know, I change subjects or anything, but I think I think the the 420, the Hoski cash grab might be the biggest NFT project in like as far as volume in all of crypto.

Speaker 7: 3:23

Like in the world.

Speaker 6: 3:24

Yes.

Speaker 8: 3:26

As long as you don't count, I've done the research. As long as you don't count, like game items that are duplicates and all that, yeah, we do have the largest. I've considered applying to Guinness. I think that'd be kind of funny. We'll see.

Speaker 3: 3:39

I think crypto kiddies has like a million assets on their one policy collection, like the OG one from 2017, 18 on Ethereum, but would have to double check.

Speaker 7: 3:49

Wow, one million.

Speaker 8: 3:50

There goes. He just said I forget we have nudes here. He's like the professor of blockchain. So yeah, that's a good question. Josh just walked in.

Speaker 7: 3:59

What's up guys? Hi Josh, oh, you guys are both sharing one profile, cool.

Speaker 6: 4:06

Yeah, we're both sitting in our podcast room. We share Twitter.

Speaker 7: 4:10

Sounds clear. You guys do have a podcast room. That's awesome, so you got your coffee done, you're good to go.

Speaker 10: 4:18

What kind of coffee are we talking about? Well, this is a fun fact. I used to run a coffee roasting social impact subscription service for fun on the side.

Speaker 7: 4:30

Oh, that answers my previous question. I'm like coffee nerd, so this is I asked if you were a coffee snob and I guess that answers it.

Speaker 10: 4:39

I'll drink Dunkin Donuts. I'll drink anything, but if I'm making Officiano Jenny.

Speaker 7: 4:45

Oh, I love it. Yeah, I love coffee, so I'm all for it.

Speaker 10: 4:49

This is Hawaiian Kona. It should be delicious.

Speaker 7: 4:53

Do you drink it by itself?

Speaker 10: 4:54

It's still dripping through my pour over.

Speaker 7: 4:59

Oh, that takes a minute, right it does.

Speaker 6: 5:02

Why, jenny, you know.

Speaker 10: 5:06

I do my homework, I show up with coffee.

Speaker 7: 5:10

That's right. You're keeping it on brand and I appreciate that very much.

Speaker 6: 5:15

This isn't Cardano over whiskey. Cardano and whiskey.

Speaker 10: 5:18

Well, it's Friday we allow it.

Speaker 7: 5:23

It's always like later, somewhere in the world. So you're clear, but I don't want to just get too real from this because there's so much I want to talk about. We have Book here and awesome Josh and Ben. Josh is the CEO co-founder, ben is the chief growth officer which I, by the way, love that title and co-founder as well, and Book is a decentralized platform for eBooks and audio books and, unlike traditional eBooks, they use decentralized, encrypted assets, also known as DEA, which is the difference between them is that you truly own the assets. You don't rent them. You can sell them, send them, loan them, print them whole bunch of stuff and they also allow for royalty splitting and perpetuity, which is really really, really cool. For those who are not familiar, we're going to dive deep into this, so welcome.

Speaker 10: 6:25

Thank you, thank you for having us. That was a great pitch for us, no kidding.

Speaker 7: 6:30

I love your project. So I have to say I really, really enjoy having you guys here and we're going to pin some stuff at the top. But let's just get a little introduction from your side. Just, Josh, Ben. A little bit about yourselves.

Speaker 10: 6:48

Go ahead, man, Like our business or personal. What do you want?

Speaker 7: 6:52

Personal. First I would dive into the business.

Speaker 10: 6:55

Well, you know, when I'm traveling I like to tell people I grew up in Indian territory because I was born in Oklahoma, which people think is kind of ridiculous, but it is very wild westy in Oklahoma and lots there are still lots of Indians there. I moved to Dallas in 99 and worked at several largecoms and got to build some really cool stuff. I worked on the first version of Fandango, which is like a cinema movie ticket website, ended up leading interactive marketing for AT&T for a while and then was head of product at hotelscom and went to kind of the merger with Expedia and all that sort of stuff. Worked on some hot wire and Expedia stuff and got involved in some heavy duty user experience, laboratory experimentation, kind of the beginning of eye tracking stuff like that. So I was very interested in mass consumer like front-facing applications with millions and millions of users. Met Ben at a startup here in Dallas that was kind of early on in the social media cycle. Myspace was still actually had a bigger audience at that time than Facebook. So we worked on social media startups as a faith-based application and how many users we had but quite a few. We were just sort of really learning what social media was going to be kind of at the time that it was turning into what it turned into, which is really cool.

Speaker 10: 8:40

Then, towards the end of that, we got involved with the publisher. We went and started another company after that when sold and started kind of with this idea of social, socially-based books and then turned that into mass delivery of e-books and audiobooks and worked with literally almost 200,000 publishers and all the big publishers and big names and sold digital books in bulk and could deliver them around the planet in seconds, which was not possible, obviously, on the physical side. And so towards the end of that, I kind of started asking questions about what blockchain meant. I think I'd always been interested in it, ever since the very first White Paper, actually just because I've been in technology for my whole career. So when it came out there's some chatter about it, I think. Probably initially I was skeptical and thought it was kind of garbage. But when Bitcoin was still definitely, I'd say, under $50 or something, I started asking different engineers if we could mine some, mostly just because I was curious about it. So it came back to engineers several times over the years and then finally I think 2017, I started buying it because at that point I could get it on exchanges and experimented a lot with a bunch of different foreign Chinese exchanges. I think at that time Coinbase only had four tokens listed, so most of it was still kind of happening outside the US. But yeah, it was just fascinating.

Speaker 10: 10:16

It wasn't pretty much determined after we'd sold our last book company that, whatever thing we started next, I really wanted to be a blockchain what three-base thing. So it just sort of made sense. The opportunity and our background in books and this huge issue with licensed content sort of finally clicked and realized we could use the infrastructure of blockchain and NFTs and decentralized storage and digital assets and ownership to create a structure that allows people to not only own their books and audiobooks but their music and their movies and it could be podcasts. Really, we live in a world right now where nobody everybody's living their digital life online but nobody actually owns anything there, which is sort of an interesting scenario and all that could be taken away of some platforms turn off or shut down or go away or unsubscribe or delist. You or you stop paying or they get replaced like MySpace, or they get replaced like MySpace and then all that great content I put on MySpace is gone forever.

Speaker 6: 11:21

Your MySpace still looks good.

Speaker 7: 11:24

Well, talk about that. I have Audible, for example. Right, I pay every month for that, and if I don't use my credits I actually lose them. And I'm afraid to not pay for it for a month because I don't know what's going to happen to the stuff that I purchase.

Speaker 6: 11:43

So, you know, it was actually really interesting because our community was really calling us out the other day because Brandon Sanderson was talking about Audible and really his biggest thing was the split on Audible is just absolutely terrible. For authors, right, they usually get their publisher usually gets 20% of that sale, right? So if a book sells for 10 bucks, the publisher right, the person who actually owns the book gets 20%, which we think is just ridiculous. So I think there's just so much room for disruption in that area, because we really do believe in creators first, and it's like, when you open that up and you open that up to all the competition that's available for people to actually for creators to actually not have to sign exclusive deals to come work with us, get a 70% split on that, and then talking about all the utility of the blockchain, what you can pair with that, and then being able to resell and get secondary royalties, that is one area of the market that is so ripe for disruption just because the business side of it is upside down, 100% upside down.

Speaker 6: 12:57

Most of the publishers out there will tell you it's bullshit. And even as Spotify has jumped into audiobooks, there's a lot of conversations inside of publishing right now about how are they getting paid. They don't like it. So it's an interesting world. Like, really, when you dive in deep and been in publishing as long as Josh and I have, then you start seeing these cracks and like, hey, I think we can do better.

Speaker 7: 13:53

And why made you guys feel so confident you can take on this task and challenge this whole industry?

Speaker 10: 14:00

I think, we'd already built an entire reading platform before, so we were pretty confident. I mean, that was like a known thing. It wasn't like could we or could we not build a bookstore and mobile apps and get all the publishers? It's like we've already done all that once. So really the biggest challenge was like okay, how do we do this on the? When you add blockchain into that and all the Web3 components, then it I don't know, I don't know that we really like question it.

Speaker 6: 14:30

It was more the inevitability.

Speaker 10: 14:31

We were like this absolutely will happen for sure, because it's the only thing that makes sense If we're the ones who make it happen.

Speaker 6: 14:38

I think that was when we first started.

Speaker 10: 14:40

It was more, yeah, more. If we don't, somebody else is going to do it.

Speaker 6: 14:45

It has to happen Because, again, it's like when you really get it into your brain, you let it marinate and roll around in your head and it's like, hey, you know, like we always say, hey, I'll pay you $5,000 for your Kindle book, I'll pay you $5,000 for a book from Audible, and then you realize that you don't own it. It just changes everything and again, like, what we talk about is the whole web is going to change, like everything will change because digital asset ownership is here and people want to own things and it helps build community and it helps unlock other merchants.

Speaker 7: 15:20

Yeah, once that kind of clicks, it clicks right. That happened to me with crypto, my journey. And once some things clicked it was like, oh, there's no going back, it doesn't matter what happens right now, there's just no going back. It's like kind of like the internet, that's it. And then once you understand that, there's just no doubt in your brain, and then when you look around you and you see nobody's really challenging this. We have an open field, let's just go for it.

Speaker 6: 15:50

There's always gonna be challenges, right, like when you look at who dominates those spaces.

Speaker 6: 15:55

Right, and talking about your companies like Meta, google, amazon they're not gonna just relinquish power here. It's very good for them not to share data with their publishing partners, not to give them access to their audiences, which we believe is like hey, how are you making smart financial and marketing decisions if you don't have the data behind it? Like we believe that publishers and authors should know who owns their books and also who has read their books, and when you identify that as a loyalty system, it just unlocks a lot of doors so that you can do better things. And again, what it means for culture outside of that of like identifying who actually consumes books is just much larger. So I think, going back to the original question, it's like I think we always felt like this was inevitable. People are going to do this, so we might as well jump in, and so, luckily for us, we weren't new to tech. We helped build companies before, so we just started putting together our MVP list of who we wanted to work with and got to it really quickly.

Speaker 7: 17:05

And here we are right. And one of the things that I'm extremely goal oriented and one of the things I love about your model is that you are very goal oriented well, I'm sorry, value oriented and I love that. Like you guys really know what the purpose of your existence here is and your goals are aligned to your values as a company and I absolutely praise that because it's a recipe for success, in my opinion. Recently, I was just talking to somebody, remember, who was in the chat, and they made a comment about the company's purpose of existence to make a profit, and I'm like that's not really true, because if the sole purpose of a company to exist is to make a profit, why would people always have to, like, pretend to be here for a greater cost or to support something greater than themselves, right? So I feel like you guys really understand why you're here for which is why people can easily join the costs right and make it their own and drive it forward.

Speaker 7: 18:24

And you recently posted your 2024 goals and that is a test. I think the nudes you posted at the top and I think they're super, super aligned to values, right, you have you wanna make sure that you make easy signups? Fine. Improve you the media. You understand what people want, and how does that process work? You guys have meetings. How does your team work when it comes down to setting up this goals? I just wanna talk a little bit about this, because there's a lot of people here building, and I think this is very, very important if you're trying to build something that lasts.

Speaker 10: 19:10

Well, I think you're right about and I appreciate that too Like I think that we've never been focused necessarily in profit not that we don't need to make a profit to support our company in our lives, but profit is really just like an output of creating a service that meets some need, and so I think, just the way that I don't know, when we're going through those that process, a lot of it is mostly just been an eye like I mean, what's funny about books in particular, since we had the other company, I mean we've literally been arguing back and forth for 10 years about the book industry and about digital books and licensing and issues with how, you know, splits are. So it's not. It's not like we, you know quickly, like, hey, we should do, you know, not to have just any PFP projects or anything like that, but like it wasn't just like us, like hey, how do we make some money from a community or extract value somehow. It was much more like how do we implement this system at really grand scale?

Speaker 10: 20:18

Because I think the huge benefit to all of crypto is when we start to truly see mass consumer adoption of people using blockchain based things that you know they're unaware that these things even exist on blockchain, just like they're unaware of if a website is coded, and in PHP, or if it's coded in Python. Like we care about those things. I think because we're in technology and we're nerds and we like to know the guts of how these things operate because it's our job. But I think it was always like how do we bring the idea of decentralization and digital ownership to the masses? And it wasn't. We've never been focused on how do we make as much money as possible, although I will say we do need money to operate.

Speaker 6: 21:09

Yeah, I mean I think that's the idea too is they're not mutually exclusive. Yeah, like Josh said, it's like when you're creating a value added service that actually answers a mass problem. Right, you can have both. Right, like you can make a profit and that, in turn, that profit helps you grow and get bigger and bigger, which I think we're always talking about. Like, how much do we reinvest in the community? How much do we reinvest in the followers and marketing and getting ready to?

Speaker 6: 21:40

For us, when you look at that list, it's getting ready to break out of the crypto space and start meeting people where they're at right, of saying, like, hey, if you have a credit card and you have an email address, you can own your books. Right, instead of this process right now, which is the friction in cryptos, is ridiculous. Right, everybody needs a crypto sherpa, right? So we wanted to make sure that everybody can participate, right and take our audience from this sliver of crypto to the masses, which, again, josh always says. It's like there's over a billion people in the world that have digital books, right, and so that's the audience that we're going after. It's like people and, again, an audience. It's a worldwide audience. So like the ability to grow and scale very quickly is something we have to discuss and prepare for.

Speaker 7: 22:33

Sweet, and I know that you guys have a lot on your pipeline right now like a lot. You have audio books, marketplace, mint and print. You have a stake pool now and you have the book token and they don't kind of like play it all together and you're juggling all of this at the same time. And I was in the space the other day I don't know if I was in the space or in the space or if I listened to it afterwards and it looks like you're ready to do a little growth as well, right? So you're looking for you have even job opportunities in terms of development, right, you're looking for a developer that is ready to handle things right now on its own, but with a mindset of growth, which I love that, by the way. But I don't want to get too into that right now.

Speaker 7: 23:29

What I wanted to talk about is, with all these things that you have coming up and you have a pool now you have book token how is this economy looking like? And there's a lot of people that ask me what is book for? What is book gonna do? You have, you know, you have minting going on. You have royalties going on. Can you explain a little bit about the role of book within the ecosystem. So then we can talk a little bit about the pool after, because the pool it's a 99% pool, right? So all you get is book and return.

Speaker 6: 24:06

Yep. So I would say, like, for those who are really interested, go read our white paper. It's on bookio. We spent a lot of time going through that and the utility of what this token can do for both readers and authors. But you know, at the end of the day, we believe that knowledge should be decentralized so it can be unburnable and changeable and unbanable, and, second of all, that we should incentivize knowledge. Right, like the whole system that we all grew up in was pay for knowledge and we're kind of saying, what if it was the opposite? Right? So you know, in the early days we talked about it like you would mine for Bitcoin. We call it like knowledge mining, right? So the real purpose of the book token is to is a return platform, right? So everybody in the future will be competing for book in four hour blocks.

Speaker 6: 24:57

You can look through all the tokenomics and stuff on the site, but you know that's where it starts. But then when you start adding in the utility of book, like there's really no end to what we can do. Right, like there could be collector's items that can only be paid for a book. There's certain titles that can only be bought in book. There's certain print titles that can only be bought in book. There's certain merchandise that can only be bought in book. So, like having that central, like that key, you know token at the heart of our ecosystem to say like, hey, authors have to buy this in order to met with us, publishers have to hold it in order to do certain marketing stuff with us. It allows us to do just hundreds and hundreds of things. So I think right now we're gearing up for all those and we're just barely scratching the surface of what the token can be used for.

Speaker 7: 25:49

And that's up to the creator right. So that gives them an opportunity to base things you know like play around, based on their communities and what they're trying to achieve right.

Speaker 6: 25:59

Yeah, I think what you've seen with us from like the last you know since we launched the Gutenberg is like, hey, you know we have tried so many different things right Like, from subscription, from subscription models, to you know, the biggest thing is like knowing who your audience is. So you know, if you have book one, maybe book two is a discount, maybe book three is airdrop, maybe you know you can only buy this mint and print using book right Like so we already have publishers the real forward thing of publishers who want to get paid with book right Because they believe it.

Speaker 7: 26:36

I've seen that I know that people that just want to get book. I love that because you guys I feel like like you guys have a little bit of like a like an incubator of possibilities that you can do with this NFT. Honestly, the way I see it is that you guys have so many different ways of doing their whole lounge and gamification that for those who just want to do one type of NFT, you can actually go in there and look at what people are playing around with. It's a. It's very fun to watch the amount of different like it's like a rainbow Of all kinds of different ways to to to lounge and do their thing. I absolutely love it because it's a good place to test and see what works for for whom, right.

Speaker 6: 27:29

Yeah, I think you know, like what you look at with us is like what happens when you know it's not just us, it's it's a million authors talking about their book, it's a million authors gamifying it. And, like you know, I had a two hour discussion with Hoski the other day of like how do we prepare for that moment and how do we teach everybody what we know inside of of crypto ecosystems and how to gamify all that. So I think you know, for us it's getting ready to launch into the mass markets and and handle that type of volume. But you know, secondarily, you know, help publishers and big authors strategize and learn the things that we've learned so that it works and they can continue to add out, to add value and like talk to their audience.

Speaker 7: 28:16

Sounds like you need to write a book about it.

Speaker 6: 28:19

We're Josh. Josh and I are going to write a book. We decided the other day. I wrote a tweet about it. So at that point, then we're. We were committed.

Speaker 7: 28:28

What's up BlockDoc?

Speaker 9: 28:30

Hey guys, love the space so far and thanks for coming on, and what I was looking through the white paper just a little bit here, and one of the things I absolutely love is the ability to be able to track individual reading on a person by person basis.

Speaker 9: 28:44

And the reason I think about that is is that if you think about book clubs and things of that nature, you know you can maybe sponsor a book club and, within that, gamify it so that the kids or whoever's reading the books in an area that maybe doesn't have access to certain things right, that's what really Web3 should be about is access and ownership. Then we could actually, you know, be able to tell who's reading, what they're reading, you know, show a leadership board, all the things that go along with that, and they're having fun while they're reading and then they're also learning, you know. And so I'm curious as to and maybe this isn't a white paper and I'm sorry if I've missed it, but is there anything on Bookio's roadmap that talks about maybe us who are part of Bookio owning the token things of that nature, being able to sponsor book clubs outside of, maybe the industrialized countries that we live in?

Speaker 6: 29:45

I think it's always a possibility. I think you're right when you're talking about book clubs of you know there's a couple of handful of really important things there. It's being able to track where people are reading, to unlock chapters right, because you don't want to get in a book club where you know Nudes is talking about Chapter 11 and I'm on Chapter 1, right, the verification of consumption of that just drastically changes, like the educational portion of that. But again, what you're talking about too is, you know, for brands that want to sponsor that right. I'm not sure if everybody remembers the Pizza Hut Bookit program, right, but you know a lot of this was even in the beginning, way back in the day. Was us talking about the Bookit program and you know, kind of reading to earn that personal pan pizza? Like that's just scratching the surface of what you can do. When you talk about extrapolating this into a worldwide system where everyone can participate and those leaderboards are so important, like the social flex of saying that like Ben is the top reader in marketing in Dallas and he's number three in Texas, he's number four in the United States and he's, you know, number 50 in the world. And then also like what that means for, you know, education moving forward, what it means for employers to verify what people are actually consuming. So I think you know the idea of sponsoring this kind of you know those kinds of things like for sure. I think that'll happen.

Speaker 6: 31:18

From what you talked about before, I think the most exciting part is being able to give access to everyone and being able, even with, like you see, with our small book IO community, of being able to give books away and then also being able to say, like hey, we want to sponsor this book club in this, you know, underserved country and we're going to all send books there, right, and maybe that's we're all taking our book token and buying books for, for kids or whatever it might be. But I think, again, it comes down to, like, the creativity of of an ecosystem this large that has, you know, hundreds of millions of people that have digital books. Like the creativity is endless and sometimes that is actually the hardest thing inside of the publishing world, because you know they're used to. One thing is like print a book, sell a book, and it's like they don't understand the marketing side. They don't understand, like, how you use digital assets to really know your audience and to continue to serve them and deliver value day after day.

Speaker 10: 32:20

I had two things to that too. One is, you know, one thing we say often is everyone's a bookstore and everyone's a library, so I think the ability for anybody to lend out their books and that could be, you know, in some really interesting ways from a smart contract perspective, where it's automatically returning or maybe, as they read those books, if you're loaning them out, you're earning the book token while they're reading it. There's a lot of, you know, really interesting ways to think about that from you know, everybody being basically a micro library all the way up to actual, real, you know, true library services, which is a big issue currently, right now, for libraries too, because they, you know, a library is a nonprofit that, in a municipality, has taken tax dollars and bought what they think are digital books and, as licenses have started to change, you can actually Google this. It's a pretty big issue with a lot of local libraries that they're losing access to. You know they might have done some deal and spent, you know, $50,000, $100,000 buying digital books. Those get taken away and then the city has left wondering like, wait a minute, like I thought you know we bought these books, so these should be our books, that anybody that wants to come to this library and read them should have access to do so. So there's a big issue there.

Speaker 10: 33:50

I think the other interesting thing is, like we've actually sold books into, I think, like over 110 countries at this point. So I think the ability to transfer books and knowledge across borders into third world you know, countries or countries where content is illegal and banned is huge, because now we have a way to get books and knowledge and make it accessible in a way that it's never been accessible, especially, for sure, on the print side, but as a digital asset that is blockchain based, it can't be stocked. So I think there's, you know, like Ben said, when there's, you know, hundreds of millions of people using the platform coming up with tons of different creative ways because they truly own those books so they can set up exactly how they want them to function. It's going to be a huge change, I think.

Speaker 7: 34:51

And how does that like, for example, of like the liabilities for book as a company when it comes down to people training books or banned in certain places? How do you handle that?

Speaker 10: 35:03

I probably won't go to Iran for.

Speaker 11: 35:07

That's a good idea.

Speaker 6: 35:08

Yes, I've probably seen this, but we just put like a neon sign in our window this is book IO and, like, as we're doing it, we might have to turn this off soon. So I mean, I think you know, but it goes to show you, right, like that is, knowledge is power and people want to control people through propaganda. And if you have books and thoughts in various forms of media that can be traded and travel around the world and can't be banned, you're opening up a lot more than just monetary value. You're opening up people's minds and again teaching them things that they would have not been able to learn before. And again, it is a big issue, right, like people are not only banning books, they're changing books also. Right, they're making you know classic literature and stuff that was. They're changing it to fit their own narrative.

Speaker 6: 36:06

So I think some of it, too, is again like when we look at it. It's like in the print world. If somebody walked into your house and started ripping pages out of a book, like you'd freak out. But that happens in the digital world, right, people might not care that much. But as people start to get censored more and more and more, 1984 is starting to. They're going to probably have to recategorize it into nonfiction. So I think you know again, for us this is where, going even back to you, can have a mission. You can be profitable. Those things are better together because the profitability helps scale up the mission.

Speaker 7: 36:49

Absolutely, and thank you guys for like pushing forward with this. It's a, you know it's a brave not going to lie, I think it is. So kudos to you for that. So just to close on that book token, I know you have the book pool and I just want to make sure that you know. We just inform people in the room about you know what they can do if they want to stake and what are the perks. I know you have a portal for retrieving the rewards coming out. Yeah, you're using, I guess, Sunday Labs for that.

Speaker 10: 37:27

Yep, yeah, I think the Labs worked with us and yeah, it's a really nice portal, so you can. What's really nice, too, is you can let your claims stack up. You're not missing anything. They just continue to compound in there. So, yeah, so it's, you know, we have some bonus structure for getting in early. I'm not sure how far we are past that.

Speaker 7: 37:48

I think it's only now by the 10%. Does that remain right? That remains a thing.

Speaker 10: 37:55

Yeah, 10% is ongoing. So you know part of it. Really, we just we wanted to participate in the Cardano ecosystem and operate a node and run a stake pool and you know we've got like Guillermo, who runs Woodland Pools, is, you know, like expert level. He's part of Hoskey's Red Pools, red Pools and we, yeah, I think you know it's a cool way for us to help secure the network, a great way for people to earn book at a discount price and provides us. You know, we capture that data, we use it to continue, like you know, like you said earlier, hiring another engineer. So I want to continue hiring and growing and going down this path to accomplish this large mission.

Speaker 6: 38:45

Then on the marketing and growth side, it's like a new toy for me, right, so I can identify who our delegates are, and it opens up the ability to do cool things for them also. So I think you know the nice thing about what we do is we will never run out of content, right, like talking millions and millions of books with transfers into, you know, billions and billions of DEAs. So I think you know it always gives us a nice way to look at it and say, like, what else can we do? What other creative things can we do with a pool?

Speaker 7: 39:18

to get back to our delegators and make things exciting I see so many people who are their hands up and I still want to touch on a couple things. So I don't know, should we keep the hands up or should we? Let's just give. Okay, let's make a quick guess. I want to touch on two things. I want to talk about stuff, stuff, literally.

Speaker 6: 39:40

And use in meetings. Okay.

Speaker 7: 39:44

Let's go. Cardano review. Thank you for watching.

Speaker 2: 39:48

What's up? I heard you mentioned the book 1984. I just recently completed reading that and one thing that popped in my head I was like you know what, If people want to edit books, that's all right, but at least have a timestamp saying that hey, this has been an edit, and then have a link or some sort of link back on the blockchain where it shows the original original so people can always go back to what was originally written. That's what I want to say.

Speaker 6: 40:18

Yeah, for sure. I think the issue for me gets into some of the works that have been manipulated, like Roll Doll or something. It's like yo, he's gone. Do you think he wants his work changed? And I agree with you, I don't think people have a problem with it. But again, there's a big difference of an end user saying I have Frankenstein and it changed on my shelf versus I have the earlier version of Frankenstein that hasn't been manipulated. I think both have a use case where people can go back, and for us it's just like if you had that earlier version and you wanted to exchange it, we can make that happen.

Speaker 6: 41:01

That's pretty easy, which again then gets into what you're really talking about too. If things like it, edited a lot of times, is higher education books, like college textbooks, those things that can be easily transferred, that number one shouldn't cost as much as they do. And number two, the secondary market, is really just your campus bookstore. I bought a book for $400. You're willing to give me $0.25 for it? Those are things that I think that we can help change, because those systems and processes are absolutely broken.

Speaker 7: 41:39

Cool Karma, are you there?

Speaker 11: 41:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here. Thank you guys. Very intriguing. I've got a lot of questions on my mind. One of them is very simply do you own CDs? Do you hold CDs at your house, for instance, and do you still hold physical media on?

Speaker 6: 42:02

a personal, I own a shit ton of vinyl.

Speaker 7: 42:05

Not vinyl CDs.

Speaker 11: 42:07

I don't think Eight track tapes, whatever you got.

Speaker 10: 42:09

Actually. I have a lot of vinyl. I have a lot of CDs.

Speaker 12: 42:14

I got a ton of CDs too.

Speaker 10: 42:15

I have some eight tracks. I have one of my first eight tracks. Josh and I both had A lot of paper books.

Speaker 6: 42:20

I have a lot of media in general. Yeah, josh and I both used to have our old lives. We were DJs once upon a time, so both of us hold physical mediums. I think some of it, too, is even with. We can dive into stuff, but also into stuffio. But even with books, making that jump from the digital realm to the physical realm to deliver a product that has not yet existed, that is our path. I don't think. Yes, we're digital first, but at the same time, we want to hold those. Really, I want my singular book, my Minton print book that's a one-on-one cover that nobody else has in the world, and open that up for the publishing world and authors. It's going to be huge, and I can't even tell you how much work we're doing to make that happen. Publishing moves super slow, just snail slow, and so we're pushing as hard as we can to launch these products, because I think some of it is just internally. We're all kind of nerds, and this is the physical mediums too.

Speaker 11: 43:29

Yeah, well, and that's so great, because you mentioned right at the onset how important ownership is to you guys. And now I know you're not full of shit. No, but no, I thought I was the last guy on Earth. It still kept all his DVDs and CDs and buy everything else. I'm glad I'm not. And the other thing was just on the versioning. I'm a little sensitive to this is when you say it's OK to edit works in Frankenstein and this and that, raul Dahl. That's where I would part with you a little bit. I'm uber respectful of authors and their work, and you mentioned it. Stephen King doesn't want his works manipulated, and there is. I don't know that I need four versions of Frankenstein. I'll be fine with the original historic context in which it was written, and when you change that, you're changing the very nature of that literature. And you're talking to an English major. I will I have an issue with that.

Speaker 6: 44:38

Yeah, go ahead. I think we're on the same page. No pun intended, but I agree with you. I think when we see this, what has happened? Right, really.

Speaker 10: 44:49

Well, I think there's a difference between manipulating and changing text in an author or a publisher wanting to put a new addition or something right.

Speaker 10: 44:56

So if there are one, oh sure, If the author wants it, that's different, then we're building we mentioned this a while back on some other space, I think we're building an addition and protocol.

Speaker 10: 45:08

So if an author wants to change a book and they want to do like addition two, and maybe there's an extra chapter or they've changed some grammatical errors or whatever, then as the owner of the original, then you have the choice that you could either potentially a trade your addition one in to get that update in, or you could just purchase the second addition and have both of them. But either way, I think our mentality is know that original work should be written to blockchain, to decentralized storage, so that it can never be manipulated, because right now we live in a world where we have no way to know. If anything is manipulated, which is, I think, it does set us up to a 1984 situation where even in China there's a recent report where they're changing religious tech and it's like if you're only accessing stuff digitally and you don't have the hard copy, then you have no idea to know that.

Speaker 10: 46:02

Same reason why to your point about if we own physical media, one thing I wish I still owned was my Star Wars on VHS tape, because that last time that you could watch the original Star Wars in its original format, you can't watch the new Star Wars. If you have the DVDs or if you're watching it streaming, obviously nobody can watch the original Star Wars the way that it was originally made. That's kind of sad, right, and it's a small example. But part of that is, as the end consumer, we're not made aware of changes that are happening either, and I think that's dangerous.

Speaker 11: 46:35

Laser disk, Laser disk. One word for you Laser disk. Seriously, that's the last time that Star Wars was unmanipulated.

Speaker 6: 46:43

And anyway, how's that?

Speaker 11: 46:44

laser. Where's the ton of money?

Speaker 7: 46:45

Yeah, I'll trade you, Thank you.

Speaker 11: 46:47

Carmel.

Speaker 4: 46:48

So you guys like the best in the generation.

Speaker 7: 46:50

OK, got it Just checking I do want to touch on. We'll keep those hands up for a minute. I'm just going to make sure that we get a chance to talk about stuff I owe. I know that you guys are cooking some cool stuff with that and I just want to share that with the room. What is stuff I owe Is that, I've heard, is about music video. What's going on there?

Speaker 10: 47:16

Yeah, so I think when we did the original architecture for the technology back in 2021, everything that we laid out actually was for all media, so realizing that this is slicing is an issue that expands to all digital media, like our intention was, we would build a book and launch it and then, at some point, come back and build a platform for music and video and other media formats, and so I think maybe, like probably, fall of 22.

Speaker 10: 47:53

I think we bought the domain stuffio or something somewhere in there with the intention to create DEAs of music and albums and videos and podcasts and literally anything. I mean newspapers, magazines, whatever non-book type content. So we've been actively working on building that. We've actually built a prototype version of a new mobile app on Android and iOS for it and we've been pretty diligent about how we build that so that there's a lot of shared resource between it and a new version of the book. I owe mobile apps as well so that they will function similarly. So, basically, the technology that we have had to create to enable audiobooks also. There's not a whole lot of difference between an audiobook and an album, really, and there's some sort of meta differences, but functionally it's just it's audio.

Speaker 7: 48:52

I want to say something. This because you guys posted something. I'm going to read it real quick. It says there are over 4.5 million podcasts worldwide and growing. That's 70 plus million episodes, 505 million global listeners, a $56 billion industry. Podcast creators should have a say in distribution and get paid fairly. Listeners should own their stuff, and that applies to us because we do podcasting, so that's pretty interesting.

Speaker 6: 49:24

I think we're not ever going to say that you guys are like oh, we're not ever going to do stuff like this, where it's the free listening, but at the same time, if you wanted to charge for podcasts you have special guests on, like Josh Stone or something, then you should be able to.

Speaker 6: 49:45

And I think some of it, too, is just what you see in the advertising world and mostly with the big centralized players is everything is ad-based and it's annoying as hell, and so I think some of it comes back to hey, if you wanted to be able to sell a podcast and that podcast unlocks other things if you wanted to sell a subscription to this podcast, and week after week you're just air dropping stuff, you should be able to do it. Will everyone do it? No, not everybody will do it, but I think, at the same time, being able to own your media, no matter what it is, whether it's music, whether it's video, whether it's books, whether it's subscriptions, whether it's coupons, whether whatever it is Like, the door has now been opened and we want to be there. We want to help empower creators.

Speaker 10: 50:37

I'd add to that too, I think, because I had some conversations with people specifically about podcasts. I think with podcasts they're interesting because, well and it probably applies to all these other media types as well but I think a lot of times we often think, oh, podcasts are free and that means they're accessible to everybody, but they're not really free if you think about it at a higher level. So there is a requirement to access those podcasts. So that requirement could either be subscription to something, or it could be you're part of some site, your data is being farmed and the models where there's advertising. It's really not free either. If I have to listen to an ad, then what I'm doing is an in-consumer, as I'm sacrificing the most precious thing that I have, which is my time to listen to some ad that I don't want to listen to. So at the end of that, what do I really own or have? As the in-listener, I have nothing Versus. I'd be much more inclined to say, ok, here's a couple bucks per episode. I'm happy to know that the person creating the content is receiving that money directly, so it's helping fund them to make more and better content. And then I walk away actually owning that so that I have it. Historically, I could go back and listen to it. Maybe that particular episode becomes collectible or it gives me access to open or unlock something else.

Speaker 10: 52:02

But I think, moving away from this idea of, oh well, podcasts are completely free, it's like no, there is a hard cost. We don't actually see it and right now we are paying that cost. And electricity is not free, the internet's not free. Podcasts aren't free. It wasn't free for you to create podcasts. You should be compensated to make them. I should be able to own those and not have to sacrifice my time listening to ads and pay for them. That way, I should be able to pay for them however I want, and if I want to pay for them by listening to ads, great, then there's a streaming version that I could still go access.

Speaker 10: 52:40

So I don't think it's an either or I think it's a both-and, and I think there is a large contingency of people that'd be happy. The bigger podcast I listen to, I'd be more than happy to pay a monthly subscription so that I don't have to listen to ads, so that I know that money goes directly to them. So I actually get to own those episodes, or I'd rather buy them all a cart for special edition episodes if they're interviewing somebody. That I think is of notoriety. So I think it just opens up so much that creators don't have access to as far as distributing their podcasts either, right? So when you're distributing a podcast through Spotify or Apple, you don't have access to your own audience, you can't communicate directly with them, you don't know who those people are, you can't airdraw stuff to them or give them discounts on things or sell them merch or in-person tickets if you want to do some kind of event. It's just so limiting. Anyway, I'm kind of reimbling about podcast.

Speaker 6: 53:29

The coffee kicked in. Coffee kicked in. But that's the thing where we always say it's like, hey, if it's free to you, then you are the product right, you're the thing.

Speaker 7: 53:37

Exactly, you nailed it. There's nothing free. That's so true. That's a perfect way to close that argument because it is so true, you are the product, so let's just. That was great. Look forward to what's happening. Are you guys gonna be developing and more stuff during 2024? Or is that something that's gonna be more towards the end? Are we gonna be seeing more things this year Towards like music?

Speaker 10: 54:16

So we sort of have it now. We're running it in parallel, so we haven't launched anything, obviously publicly yet for it, but we have it in production in parallel with book stuff. So we'll be launching it, assuming we haven't really made any dates or anything.

Speaker 6: 54:31

Yeah, I think the second we launched Book I Ode. Then the immediate question was music, right? And so we have a lot of musicians coming in asking us that question. I think the bigger thing is when you look at those industries, like, authors are still being paid for their work, even if it's through Kindle. Maybe I don't agree with their model, but they are still being paid Whereas like musicians, they're not making anything from selling their work. Right, Like Snoop would talking about I got billions of streams on Spotify, made $40,000. It's like yo man, release some of the old death row stuff to us. You're gonna make $40,000 in like two seconds. Right, like these people, shit like I go back and we even we're talking about like the physical goods and the CD era. It's like man, I want my musicians to be making a lot of money because then they make better music, right. So, again, I think part of it is just getting back to a time where creators make money and I own my stuff, so it's a pretty easy tagline.

Speaker 7: 55:33

I love it. I absolutely love it, and I hope to see it all the way to movies, because there's so many stuff that I stuff. I love this. I know it's just I just love it. It's so perfect. So many movies I've purchased in Amazon that disappear from my library. It's ridiculous, and this is what the trick they do, right? They make the purchasing just like a couple of dollars more than the renting, right? So you're like I'm gonna purchase, but then you realize they lose the license, and then you lose the license too, so you don't get to watch a movie again.

Speaker 6: 56:09

Yep, yeah, and I think the same thing is like, if you put that on a global secondary market, right, then you have the extra deleted scenes, you have the air drops of the real fan stuff that we all wanna see, and again we're pumping money back to creators, like the real creators, so that we can have better and better forms of art, and I think that's always been real. The heart of the mission here was like hey, we believe creators should be paid and because of that, if you push that out 15 or 20 years, then we all own our stuff and creators continue to make money in perpetuity. Right, 100 years from now, they're still gonna be getting royalties from what we're doing.

Speaker 10: 56:49

I have to unfortunately go get on a call with two different law firms oh no.

Speaker 7: 56:54

Okay.

Speaker 10: 56:55

I have to leave the party, but I'm gonna leave them here and keep rambling about stuff.

Speaker 7: 56:58

Thank you for coming. Yeah well, I actually just wanted to touch on book the book con, so Okay, awesome. Thank you for coming. Hope to have you here. Come back. So let's talk about book. I know you might have to walk away soon too, so let's just touch a little bit of book con, because book IO con 2024 is coming up, 420. Was that on purpose? Tell me it was.

Speaker 5: 57:27

Yes, it was Okay, I knew it.

Speaker 6: 57:30

Purpose we're like basically, josh was like I'll put out this tweet and it's like we're gonna do our own conference. That's basically the way it started. So and here we are hustling to get it done on top of everything else that we're doing.

Speaker 7: 57:43

I know you guys are so ambitious. I love it. So, book con, you're gonna have field experts. You're gonna have you're also gonna bring in some of your investors right, which is great. You're gonna have authors joining publishers. You're gonna have Charles. It's gonna be multi-chain because you do have you do mint in different blockchains. So, and one of the coolest things is that you're really doing this to build community. This is not for raising money, because all the money that you're making through this, you're putting a rub back into the event. You're flying in all your staff. It's gonna be a big, gigantic party.

Speaker 6: 58:23

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we ever looked at it as like a money making event, Like we looked at it as like, how do we, how do we get, all get together and have a lot of fun and, you know, talk about books and talk about the future. And you know, I think we've made a lot of friends throughout this journey, both from the community side and then across multiple chains, and I think this is gonna be great. Just a time to hang out and knowledge share. And you know, hell, there's a lot of the team that I've never even met, right Like most of our team is. We have people all over the world, so a lot of these people we've never even met face to face. So it'll be a great time to sit around and drink some beer and discuss what the future holds.

Speaker 7: 59:07

Yeah, I pinned that up at the top. For those who are interested in going. There's also a. If you cannot make it in person, there's also a virtual. How's the virtual experience gonna look like?

Speaker 6: 59:19

We'll stream in everything. I think it's important to note that even on the virtual tickets there is a limit because we wanna protect the rarity of those books given away on the virtual side. So we'll just stream everything else in. You know, if you are interested mostly in like the VIP side and the VIP dinner the night before, I would highly recommend it. If you're gonna get a good to go, do it beforehand, because you do get a discount in our Discord. There's coupon codes in there. So again, yeah, I think we just wanna have a lot of fun and talk to authors and talk to publishers and bring in some of our advisors, both from the book side and the music side, and just sit around and discuss what everybody's building.

Speaker 7: 1:00:05

And talk about events, and that's. It's great. I hope to see you guys there. Everybody check it out. But I also heard in a space that you're going to have demo going on. Are you guys gonna be representing in South by Southwest? Is that true?

Speaker 6: 1:00:20

I think we're just gonna. I think one of our guys, one of our music advisors. We were gonna go down and meet him at South by Southwest, but I think we're not gonna do that because he's the guy that actually started Bevo, the music video site, and he's taken off. He's not gonna be in Austin. Since Josh and I have to travel next week, we decided not to go because we don't wanna kill ourselves. So I think a lot of that.

Speaker 7: 1:00:48

That's a lot yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:00:49

Yeah, we just have so much inbound right now.

Speaker 7: 1:00:51

I mean, Well, maybe if by next year, you guys will be able to have something there and like, actually have a booth, that'll be awesome, that's a great event.

Speaker 6: 1:00:59

Yeah, it is. We're not far from Austin, Like I love going down there. We're always digital first and I think we already have some demos rolling out to musicians and to agents and that kind of stuff and the inbound is already starting to stack up. So we have a lot of work to do just to get the stuff out there and preparing to start selling music and other forms of media. Sweet.

Speaker 7: 1:01:26

You're really, really ready to start showcasing the stuff. Do you have time for a couple of questions here, or you'll have to just run? Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 6: 1:01:35

Okay, cool.

Speaker 7: 1:01:37

All right, Gold Rush.

Speaker 5: 1:01:39

Hey, I'm glad that the topic of events came up, because I'm in Nashville I noticed you guys were coming to Vanderbilt University.

Speaker 3: 1:01:45

I was just curious what type of presence you're gonna have at that event. Maybe I should stop in and grab some swag and shoot the breeze with you guys or just kinda how you expect that event to go down.

Speaker 6: 1:01:58

Yeah, so I think that event just got decided yesterday, so I'm not sure on all the details. I know it's like an. It's a author event, so we're really happy to be there and talk to a lot of independent authors. You know, I think there's like six or 700 authors that attend this event. Also, you know, one of our investors, ingram content group, is in Nashville, so we'll spend some serious time in Nashville, like anything. We don't like to go to events and do it half-assed, so we'll try to show up and do some special stuff, but I think it'll always just be mostly with those events of really teaching authors like what our platform can do for them. At that point, you know, mint and Print will be live and we'll be showcasing not only what you can do on the digital side, but also on the physical side too. Sweet, you guys are going to Vegas too, right?

Speaker 7: 1:02:52

Yep To Rare, yeah, yeah, awesome, I'm only going to Vegas.

Speaker 6: 1:02:55

That's not a hard one to pull to pull my arm.

Speaker 7: 1:02:57

You sold let's have Jarhen.

Speaker 6: 1:03:01

I know Jarhen's going to go to book on.

Speaker 7: 1:03:04

So Are you there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'll be there, Looking forward to meeting the team.

Speaker 4: 1:03:10

And you know, Jenny, I know you'll be there and everything. And I know you'll be there, I know you'll be there, I know you'll be there, I know you'll be there, I know you'll be there and everything. Yeah, it's going to be a good time. My question it kind of connects in with what Karma was asking before and perhaps you can't answer it individually, right, but it goes to the ethos of the organization or business itself. And so, real quick, gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was writing a book before he died and almost finished it, but he had dementia.

Speaker 7: 1:03:38

Oh, you saw that. Yeah, I read that there's, oh my God, yes, finished, yeah no, it's okay.

Speaker 4: 1:03:45

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm excited, right. But at the same time he did not want it to be published. But his sons decided, because he had dementia, that he wasn't capable of fully judging his own work, and so they are going to release the book and it's called Until August. And so where I'm going with this is has the book team thought about that? You know, like books released through a trust, or you know someone who's died and didn't want their work released. So again, it kind of connects in with Karma was saying, but it's a little different, have you guys? Have you guys talked about that before?

Speaker 6: 1:04:17

Yeah, I think we talk. I mean, we talk about this kind of stuff all the time because it's such a long tail of what ifs right. So I think always on those scenarios we'll take it case by case and make those decisions as we move forward. It's always interesting, right Of when you really get into the publishing industry, of like, who owns those books, who owns or writes those books. So we run into this stuff all the time of who you know, even inside a publishing house who actually owns those rights to release a book. So we deal with it all the time.

Speaker 6: 1:04:53

I mean, the bigger issue is just, like you know, digital ownership didn't exist and now it does, and so we have to fight that fight right as far as versus licensing and what it means and educating fleets of lawyers at all times. In that very specific case, you know, we'd have to dive in. Man, I can't make a decision like that right off the bat. But I think we've always been in the mindset of, like, what was the creator's intention? Right, and starting there, because, again, we're just, we're never going to be a cash grab for books. There's millions and millions of titles and we really want to stick to the ethos of what was the intention of this, of this writing. So it's a hard one to answer, but I think it's just case by case.

Speaker 4: 1:05:46

Love it, love it. Don't worry, I'll get you loaded up with whiskey and Shirley temples at the con. I'll get it out of you.

Speaker 7: 1:05:54

Shirley temples. It is what's up, Shaggy.

Speaker 5: 1:05:59

Yeah, I actually had kind of a two part question, one of which pertain to fungible token assets. Here on Cardano I work with six city and that that team, jimmy and Freddie, have been able to utilize fungible tokens as a method to distribute both music and literature and magazines and stuff like podcasts. They've already done it. This has been the thing that they have offered out to the community already for a while and I was kind of wondering if fungible tokens were ever in the mix for you guys potentially. And then secondly, on the music side, I wanted to kind of offer up any sort of advice your music team may need in navigating the Cardano music ecosystem or the smart contract side.

Speaker 5: 1:06:48

Jimmy and Freddie got you all covered, so if you ever need any help, just highlight Jimmy. He'd be more than happy to that be six city seven on Twitter. He's been around for like three years I think a little bit more than that, probably a long time before I got here. So just want to let you know he knows the music side back and forth, so he's done nooms record store and all of that other stuff Do you have a question, Shaggy.

Speaker 7: 1:07:14

You said it was a question.

Speaker 5: 1:07:17

Yeah, I didn't know what they planned on offering. As far as the music side, like, is this just going to be like a full album thing, or are you going to be able to do singles, like do you know who I'd be able to reach out to for information on that?

Speaker 6: 1:07:31

Yeah, I think you know we'll do both. I mean, again, it's always creator driven first, right, so you know, I think you know creators have to look at it in a much larger ecosystem of how they want their work out there. Right, so I think they could drop singles, they can drop entire albums, you know, it's really up to them. I don't think we're the people who make those decisions. Like, I don't think, as a platform we ever wanted to be, that it's like, really we're here to help, support creators and help them actually sell their music.

Speaker 6: 1:08:02

Outside of that, I think we're in the exploratory phase of like, how does that best work? Right, like, sell an album, get access first, access to ticket sales, get you know limited edition vinyl. Get merged, get you know what is. There's a much bigger long tail on the merchandising and marketing side and I think you know we want to be in the first access of actually selling music and helping them build their fan base and giving them access to their fan base. And now how they do that is going to be up to them. I think, again, as we've gone through book IO and the things that we've learned and the tests that we've run.

Speaker 6: 1:08:40

We can. We can give them advice, you know. But we give advice to authors and publishers, who sometimes don't take our advice either, right? So I think some of it will be. They understand their audience. We're here to give them advisory counsel, but outside of that, we want to make sure the technology works and they can reach their audience.

Speaker 5: 1:09:03

I really appreciate that. Thank you. Now, as far as the fungible.

Speaker 7: 1:09:07

Okay, we have more.

Speaker 5: 1:09:10

No, no, I don't think he got to that. Okay, so the. I'm not trying to be rude.

Speaker 6: 1:09:18

The fungible side really comes down to, like the way that we look at a digital asset right, like when we meant a book, it is a singular object on the blockchain, right, and when you start looking at like fungible side, like tying fungible tokens to a piece of content, there's a lot of licensing stuff that gets kicked off, so it gets from the legal side, it starts getting really messy. It probably, you know, it would probably be faster for us, but we really believe in like singular objects, singular albums, being a person, right, so it's album 0000. I have album, you know, 3095. So I think the way that we look at it, both from a consumer side and then from the legal side which, again, you would not believe how many legal conversations we have I mean, josh just left to go have a patent conversation. So I think on those we always have to just measure it out and see what we're going to do moving forward.

Speaker 6: 1:10:23

But a good question. I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of people in the music space doing stuff, that's, you know, token gated or whatever and some have had success. I think that our ethos is just a little bit different. Like we want those singular objects that also have a rarity to them, so that people know what you know. There isn't an infinity number. There is this limited edition, just like you would have when printing vinyl or printing books.

Speaker 7: 1:10:51

Unfortunately we lost Chaggy, but he's still in the listening room so hopefully you got to go back and listen to whatever you missed when you were in the process. So the things for answering that have two more hands. I really want to be respectful of your time, ben. Do you have time for those or no?

Speaker 6: 1:11:09

I'll let you know when I have to balance. Okay, perfect, okay, I'll just leave.

Speaker 7: 1:11:15

Please don't do that. Just let me know, and then I'll review what's up.

Speaker 2: 1:11:22

Hey, my question is for authors who maybe, let's say, they're in a politically rough situation and they want to publish a book using your platform. But you know they obviously they want to keep their credentials kind of anonymous because maybe they might be under persecution or whatever. How would they go about publishing to your platform, or do you guys have a way for them to do that?

Speaker 6: 1:11:53

Yeah, I mean they can publish with us. It's not a problem. People use pen names all the time now, obviously, like even with us. You know, to a certain degree we have to know who they are because of the way we pay them and some of the legal aspects of it, but it's not like we would share that out, so I don't think it's a big deal at all. It's pen names, you know. People do it all the time.

Speaker 7: 1:12:18

Does that answer your question? Okay, cool, oh yeah. Yeah, that answered it. Appreciate it? Yeah, of course. Thanks, Lord.

Speaker 13: 1:12:29

Testing, testing one, two. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

Speaker 7: 1:12:32

Yeah, so we can hear you.

Speaker 6: 1:12:34

I'm that DJ voice.

Speaker 13: 1:12:36

Hey everybody, good morning, Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, wherever you might be, I do have a question for a book Now. Recently you had the El Paso book that was, or the Genesis book that was minted With that. You also let us see that question at 20 Q&A video that they made and that popped an idea in my head Now. I didn't even know anything about El Paso verse until I watched that video and it made me more interested.

Speaker 13: 1:13:07

Now, when we have onboarding artists or, excuse me, authors and later on artists and everything, do you all have any ideas about doing like in house marketing? Because we have Adelink, who's a building marketing affiliate group here on Cardano, and the idea popped in my head after watching that video. A lot of these new authors could do a lot of background information on their stories, as well as their background and their history, their lore. The question I have is do you all have any plans on doing marketing in house, like the videos and everything, and helping out the authors as they put their goods online? That's my question. Thank you.

Speaker 6: 1:13:57

Yeah, absolutely we do. I think we're building out. I'm sitting in our podcast room because we want to really talk about books. We want to learn about the story behind the story. We also want to help them get their works and their narratives out there. So I think we'll do that in house. I think it like any other platform, I think that there will be peripheral businesses that start up also that also help people with this.

Speaker 6: 1:14:32

Just because of the amount of time, we can't put a full force marketing behind every author, as the more that we meant and as we begin to ingest an entire publishing catalogs, we can't say like, hey, everybody, 401, we're minting this. At 405, we're minting this. This is like, here's the books by what you want, just like in any other bookstore. But we will definitely start doing more and more of that because it's fun and we want to talk about books. But I think, as far as even with the book token itself, a lot of those in-house services will have to be paid for in-book to get access to the stuff that they want to have access to. So I think some of it is just go back, read the white paper and look at the full ecosystem of what we're trying to build Because, again, you're talking about millions and millions of authors. We can't put our full marketing force behind everybody, but we want to help, support people as best as we can, and really I love books, so I want to talk about books.

Speaker 13: 1:15:38

Hey, excellent. Well, I appreciate that answer. It's very detailed. I like that. As long as there's plans in the future, I'm on board, just like the rest of us down here. Please keep on building, keep spreading the gift of reading and spread good vibes. Thank you.

Speaker 6: 1:15:55

Thanks, lord man, it's. Good hearing you.

Speaker 7: 1:15:57

Thank you so much, lord. I do have a question here for somebody. That posted says if a person wants to publish a book, what is the process for that?

Speaker 6: 1:16:10

You can go to bookio slash authors. Again, we have thousands and thousands of people waiting on us. I know that people are super impatient Nobody's as impatient as we are and so we're really working on building out those tools to get to everybody. And I think even last night I probably had five or six DMs of just Cardano projects that won't amend books with us, right, and that doesn't even include all the other inbound that we get. So you can go to bookio slash authors, fill out the form. We're trying to get to everybody as fast as we possibly can and still have time to do everything else that we're trying to build Great.

Speaker 7: 1:16:52

Yeah, I know it's been the question, and the whole self-publishing too, right. I remember that used to be the everyday question.

Speaker 6: 1:16:58

Yeah, I think we've made giant strides there, right, like RJ was in on our early morning executive meeting and he was like I think we're minting today. What are we minting? Right, and it's super nice to have our CTO not know, because he's so far removed in that process of the daily minting right now that he's working on bigger and better stuff, and that's an important part. Right Like, to get this to millions of users, we need millions and millions of books, right, it's kind of the chicken and the egg scenario, as we can build up an audience, but really, at the end of the day, everybody here wants to read their favorite books and own them.

Speaker 6: 1:17:37

So there's the content side. We spend our time in two different worlds, which is the crypto world, right, where we talk about tech and people understand the ethos, and then we spend our time in the publishing world, basically explaining what is blockchain. So we go back and forth and it's an interesting place to be, because a lot of times when we hop on those calls, they have no idea what we're talking about. We have to start from square one of what does digital ownership mean?

Speaker 7: 1:18:08

Yes, no, absolutely my gosh. You guys are like doing so much and you're going to have to develop your own little government system there. How you handle all these things. To be honest, it's a lot right. Yeah, you have to have your own contract there. How is it that we wanted to manage these things? It's a process. You have the tech. You have all the nuances that come with it.

Speaker 6: 1:18:39

Yeah, I think, when we're talking about what we're building over this last amount of time, it's the foundation to be able to do this at a mass scale. We don't want to be just a collectible book site that launches collectibles every day. We want to be able to ingest millions and millions of titles. Then that says, okay, well, now you have billions of DEAs and how do you handle all the support that goes along with it? So that's really what we're building towards. Of this first bit has been the foundational experience, I believe right Then, once we release easy sign up and credit card purchasing, now we're capable of selling to everybody. Like Josh said before, I don't think people are going to care what the tech is in the background. They want to own their stuff. They want to own their books.

Speaker 7: 1:19:35

Absolutely. I try to tell people the whole impatient part. It's like, hey, you grow because you have to, not because you want to, because the healthy way to grow is to have to push. When you have all this demand, it's beautiful, you want to expand, but if you don't take it slowly and prioritize it could be damaging for you. So I totally understand.

Speaker 6: 1:20:03

For us, it's the constant focus. Where are we putting our focus? I think even if you look at the tweet we released the other day, it's just really basic. Here are the 2024 goals. Every last one of those goals is to allowing the normie to be able to jump onto Book I O and buy a book, to earn book token as they read and then be able to lend or sell or give away that book. Then you extrapolate that into all the other types of media that we want to get into. That's really building the foundation of where we want to be Again, because if you're Simon Schuster, you have millions of titles.

Speaker 6: 1:20:41

You don't want to do this title by title. You want to be able to give us a feed and we say your books are on sale. Then start exploring that data on how do we improve the reading experience for the end user. How do we give better data back to the publishers and authors so they can make actionable marketing intelligence, which they never had before. Again, if you can snap your fingers and know everybody that has a Stephen King title, we can do that on chain. What else does that open up for you? We always say that first sale is just the beginning of the merchandising cycle and exploring that, with thousands of authors and thousands of publishers, it's getting ready for that moment on. How do we educate everybody on what we do every day? Again, at that point now we're a total platform. We're here to empower creators and authors and publishers. Not looking at it from hey, we're just a daily minting service.

Speaker 7: 1:21:42

Absolutely. I see Jonah. He's such a great guy. I feel like that's a last question because we're going to shut it down soon, not before getting you guys attention on the Jumbotron. It looks like Bookio is offering a discount code for the virtual experience for the con. Check it out for the next 10 awesome listeners. Is that what it says here?

Speaker 6: 1:22:13

I think it's 15, I think 15?

Speaker 7: 1:22:15

What is it? I missed it Just kind of moved.

Speaker 4: 1:22:18

Visors.

Speaker 7: 1:22:19

Okay, no, it says 10. Oh no, so 40% discount. If you want to join that virtual experience, check it out. It's been up at the top. Thank you so much for that. You're always so supportive, you've always been great to us and we appreciate that very much.

Speaker 6: 1:22:38

Yeah, you guys are working hard.

Speaker 7: 1:22:40

Appreciate it, Jonah. What's up?

Speaker 12: 1:22:43

Hey, jenny, you're holding down a great space this morning. Thank you so much for letting me up Bookio again. Thank you for being here for so long. Really excellent to see you engaging with the community. I had a question, a comment, and maybe you can provide some information. I noticed that everything is on the IPFS. All of your data is there, and do you have any concerns about the IPFS? Do you have I'm just thinking about you mentioned things like 100 years time frame for the books and so forth, and what are sort of your strategies around pinning that data? And then, if you have like a really robust system involved, do you have a way to share that with other projects? Because I know you guys are very, very well supported and I think you've probably come up with excellent processes to sort of maintain those pinned items on the IPFS. I'd love to just hear a little bit quickly about how you feel about that.

Speaker 6: 1:23:40

I would say you know, part of this would be a better question for my CTO. I think we started with IPFS. I think we're happy there right now. It doesn't mean that we wouldn't be able to move stuff over, right. So I think it's always the exploratory conversation. When you look at digital asset ownership, it's still just a super young industry, I mean. Even when you talk about Cardano, I mean it's still a super young chain, right, Like. So I think a lot of it comes down to.

Speaker 6: 1:24:11

We're always open to new stuff. We're always exploring and having those conversations probably probably a little bit too much, because we're always discussing about how we can increase these processes. But yeah, you know, I think for us it's always. I'd have to ask the guys if they have documentation on that pinning process and how we're continuing to do that. But I know that we're working with a couple of great people, even in the Cardano ecosystem. So we're always exploring and talking to other groups. We're always exploring and talking to other companies that are doing cool stuff, Because, again, you're hitting on a good point. What we do is not easy, right, and so streamlining that process is a big, big deal, right? How do we go from being able to launch a book. I think, outside of the artwork and all that, we've gotten down to being able to launch a book in a couple hours, right. That used to be like a week, right, but we really need to get it down into two minutes and seconds.

Speaker 12: 1:25:20

Also, I have one quick follow-up before I need you to jump in there. Oftentimes what I do as an NFT purchaser is I will go into the IPFS and actually download the asset myself and maintain it locally, just to have security that I know I'm managing those assets myself as well. Is that possible with your book data? Like if I went to the IPFS and saw in access that URL, would I see the full book there, or do you have it encoded somewhere?

Speaker 6: 1:25:48

Yeah, we have it encrypted. Think about us as decentralized DRM. That's what makes this whole system work right. You have to be able to protect the artist's work, but also you have to be able to protect the artist's work, and then in the future, people have to be able to build on top of what we're doing, so that Stanford could have their own reader, samsung could ingest our reader to build it into their hardware. It's not about building a walled garden around what we do. It's more about being able to say people should own their assets and then other people can build on top so that books can be read from anywhere.

Speaker 12: 1:26:26

That's awesome. Sorry, one more quick follow-up If I, would you guys ever make it possible, if I was to download that file locally, that I'd be able to access it through your reader? Is that something you guys have thought about, or is that totally out of scope?

Speaker 6: 1:26:40

I don't know. I'd have to get back to you on that one. I think we've discussed it. Obviously, when you look at our roadmap, I would say that's not at the top of our list.

Speaker 12: 1:26:52

I really appreciate your time and your candidates. Thank you so much.

Speaker 6: 1:26:55

Thanks, Jenna.

Speaker 7: 1:26:58

Thank you so much, jenna, for your question and Nudes my friend.

Speaker 3: 1:27:04

Yeah, awesome space. Jenny did a great job, especially trying to get through so many different topics and then a bunch of community perspectives as well. Just wanted to say thanks a lot for you guys coming by. I put some fun stuff in the comments of the space. There's also a pen to the top, a direct link to the white paper that you can check out. Some other fun things with the Bookit program from Pizza Hut and others.

Speaker 3: 1:27:26

But one thing I wanted to share, a perspective and then ask a question. So one of the coolest book experiences I've ever heard in my life was traveling, backpacking in Laos, and they have a really cool program there called Big Brother Mouse that I just wanted to put on your radar. It basically is like for the backpacker circuit there you can make a donation and you buy books for these small indigenous villages and we went on a motorbike tour and brought these school books for kids and we met the elder of the village and signed our names and the village logbook and stuff and they're a really great program. That kind of earlier when we were talking about addressing underserved markets and third world countries and places like that, there's some great ones in Southeast Asia, so I wanted to give them a shout out and say check out Big Brother Mouse. And the second thing I wanted to ask is for Book IO.

Speaker 3: 1:28:13

Right now all of the things that you're creating are very read, only types of assets. And have you envisioned or played around with ideas about DAs that you could write in so like a journal NFT, and if I wanted to use that as my diary or then share it with somebody and send the NFT to Jenny and she could write a page and we could pass it around the community, kind of taking it to the next step? You know Internet 1.0 is read only and then we can start writing in these things. I think it would be a really fun evolution. Curious to know your thoughts in that regard.

Speaker 6: 1:28:43

Yeah. So the first one, I think, is really cool, like with your experience of being able to have, like social impact, right. This is the amazing thing about smart contracts is, like those smart contracts can feed into anywhere and then, you know, we can set it up for thousands of nonprofits where authors could choose, like, if you're writing on a topic that is an important topic, like, and you want to give back to a social impact group, you should absolutely be able to do so and it's so nice because that's a transparent way to say hey, you know the royalties from this. At first, say, 5% of the royalties go back to protecting, you know, child trafficking, right, because that's what you're writing about. And then, ongoing, you know, 10% of those royalties are always going back to the same, to this same charity. I think it's such an amazing way for us to, number one, consume knowledge and then give back. I just it's in my mind. I think it's just such an amazing thing that we can do and just another reason for blockchain technology. We've seen people do this. We had one a while back where we had actually it was a polygon based book and it was carbon offsets and each purchase, actually they, you know, portion of that goes back to actually doing carbon capture. So the book was like the first, you know, positive carbon book ever, which I thought was just so cool because, again at a grand scale, it's just people making purchases that they would normally purchase and having social impact, and I think that's awesome and I think that that technology will proliferate across all of blockchain technology because it just makes a lot of sense that we can buy the things that we want to buy and also have social impact.

Speaker 6: 1:30:35

The second part is like collaborative storytelling. We've definitely discussed that both like the journaling side. And then you know, offshoots to a story ongoing, you know changing of that DEA or even fan fiction. Some of that gets into some legal aspects of of how does that creator of that initial story want that to be told and how do they get, how do they get paid on royalties. But again, all of these things are answerable, right? I think it was just again in our roadmap like where we're starting is let's build this up first and then less, you know, let's create a mass market of readers and authors and then we'll start diving into other aspects of the, of the technology. And again, like you're right, like the, the really exciting part is there's no end to the creativity, and that's why we were constantly talking about focus and like what's the next thing we're focusing on?

Speaker 1: 1:31:35

Thanks, bookio, for stopping by. We look forward to the book con coming up on April 20th. Link down below. We want to give a big thank you to today's show sponsor, Cardano spot. The Cardano spot app is building to become the ultimate gateway to the Cardano ecosystem, breaking down barriers with open access articles and the hottest content in over 10 different languages. Download the Cardano spot app today on Google Play or the app store and join over 40,000 users on the future of social media, powered by web three. We want to give a big shout out to our monthly podcast supporters the wizard Tim discover Cardano. Bookio project camo Linda from stake pool tickermlu twisted gears me hona nigma. Stake pool ticker one monster. Stake pool ticker MN. Str, epoch sect and psychos. The Cardano card game. We appreciate all your support. If you'd like to have your name or business mentioned in future podcasts or have your logo and links displayed in the description of our podcast, click the support button now.