Have you heard of PDFs? Part 1
just because we crypto-can, doesn't mean we crypto-should
middleman, middle-ground, middling argument
On this week’s issue of I Read This So You Didn’t Have To: “The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books,” by Elle Griffin, a mishmash of crypto apologism (part 1) and hand-waving about fanfiction (part 2). I’ve spent two months thinking about this article, and you may ask yourself why I’ve let it occupy my brain for so long, but it’s because I don’t want to write off every instance of crypto crap without explaining why it is riddled with logical and legal fallacies. So here we go:
The article outlines how crypto-backed digital books might open up authors to new means of financial stability by providing investment paths from readers, thereby circumventing the exclusive and underpaid relationships often found with traditional publishers. Simultaneously, this model introduces a new kind of reader participation in the lifecycle of the book by allowing readers to invest in a work early on, then reap the monetary rewards when the book succeeds. Griffin further argues that, incentivized by their own investment, readers could and would foster success for their chosen authors by promoting the work on their own time and with their own resources. A win-win, no? Authors receive financial backing and readers receive financial return.
I take a lot of issues with this model: first, Griffin does not convincingly establish why such an investment model must rely on cryptocurrency, an abominable entity that I’ve written about previously.1 She admittedly acknowledges that there may not be an author or reader base for this model but fails to account for the fact that e-books, which have existed since 1971, have not yet attained remotely the same popularity as printed books. And she spins a lot of wool about this model offering a “middleground” to intellectual property rights for authors, without clarifying why readers should reap the profits of someone else’s work. Ultimately, however, I’m frustrated by the notion that the process of choosing what book to read needs to be available for profit—Griffin asks us to imagine how this model would transform the reading experience: “Suddenly a trip to Barnes & Noble becomes an investing opportunity.”
The return for readers, in addition to potential profit paid out in cryptocurrency, would amount to “special NFT editions” of books, elusive rewards, and the opportunity to direct where the story goes next. We’re racking up troublesome concepts here: unstable currency, reduced author agency, and art-by-committee. Let’s break it down:
Citing suppressed wages as a motivating factor to adopt crypto-backed digital books, Griffin quotes an author who notes that crypto crowdfunding allowed her to focus on writing her book. Could she not have crowdfunded using a non-crypto website? The distinction, Griffin said, is that the crypto website is not donation-based but investment-based. Why such investment-based platforms are limited to cryptocurrency is not explained, and Griffin further justifies the difference as follows:
Think of NFTs like a pictographic way to ensure that one person is the only owner of a particular item—like how a deed ensures that you are the only person who owns your house. In this case, the NFT represents a book’s intellectual property—as in, whoever owns the NFT actually owns the rights to the book. If we’re imagining a world in which we can invest in Harry Potter, now imagine that once the series is complete, one person (or entity) could own it. As of 2021, estimates place the value of the Harry Potter franchise at $43 billion, but the NFT would likely go for much more than that.
I am flabbergasted at this framing. This is just intellectual property rights, but now with an NFT instead of a PDF contract. First, it’s embarrassing that we’re still using Harry Potter as our go-to example for anything in the Year of Our Lord 2022. Second, someone does actually own the rights to Harry Potter, and they didn’t need to put it on the blockchain to ensure that. Finally, why would the NFT, the token of the deed, sell for more than the existing estimated value of the Harry Potter franchise? What evidence does Griffin have to back that claim?
There is considerable history of authors giving up ownership of their work to detrimental effects, as the multi-century narrative of international copyright law can attest. Griffin notes that currently, intellectual rights holdings for books tend to fall in one of two places: the author or the publisher. She posits that these crypto-backed books would allow redistribution of those rights to direct investors, cutting out the “middlemen” of traditional publishers to “empower” the creator by garnering authors greater returns. If an initial purchaser sells their stock or token to a second buyer, the author gets a percentage of that sale, whereas they previously would not receive any money from a secondhand book purchase.
Griffin frames such a model as a “middle-ground” between rights owned by a publishing house or by the author. But I am confused: Is the audience the middle ground between these two entities? Does owning a percentage of stock in another author’s copyright not further dilute the power that author has over it? Griffin argues that authors could be protected by retaining the majority share of the rights to the book, in addition to franchising and licensing for characters. But framing “readers get a buy-in” as a middle ground to the “all or nothing” of rights ownership between an author or a publisher is misleading.
And let's be honest here: Who actually owns significant caches of cryptocurrency to invest in these projects? Likely not the average reader. Such a model provides wealthy investors more control over the intellectual property rights of a work they had no hand in creating, extracting wealth from someone else’s labor.2 Crypto casts itself as eliminating the middleman while actually replacing it for its shareholders.
Griffin again justifies that placing a book on the blockchain would allow rights-holders to track to whom and how many times the book is sold:
In this scenario, owning a book becomes more like owning a Picasso: many can view it for a low fee, but only one (very rich) person truly owns it, increasing the value of their investment by loaning it out. Or think about it like a record label owning a musician’s masters: anyone can listen to the album on Spotify, but one (very rich) entity owns the masters and earns royalties on each stream. Books could operate the same way.
Griffin’s primary question is “How might we better compensate authors?” I can see here how she is trying to innovate on ways for authors to make more money, for example, by receiving residuals from secondhand resales. But that model discounts how artists have fought tooth and nail to get the rights to their catalogs back from record companies, and streaming has devastated, not stabilized, artist compensation. Because users opt for streaming services instead of purchasing albums, musicians have completely inverted how they make their money: rather than rely on record sales and supplement with touring, they now bank on touring and supplement with streaming. This inverse has motivated older artists to sell their catalogs en bloc, typically to investment firms, for an immediate multi-million dollar payment. This model would streamline intellectual property rights into the hands of corporations, not authors.
e-books are not books but they are e(xasperatingly hard to manage)!
The second flaw in this model hinges on the ephemerality of the digital sphere: currently, the vast majority of us who read digital books, whether from our library Libby apps or downloaded on our Kindle, do not own those digital books. E-books are not categorized (there it is!) the same way as physical books. The latter are understood as intellectual property copyrighted under the First Sale Doctrine, which allows booksellers and libraries to resell or lend books at any (or no) price after the first sale.
E-books are not books under copyright law, but considered software that is sold under a use license. Software providers such as Amazon and Libby essentially host renters’ contacts between the user and the publisher for the use of a text. So when you download a book to your Kindle from Amazon, you do not own that copy of the text as you would a printed copy. You are renting the use of the book from Amazon’s rental contract from publishing companies. If one of those contracts breaks, you lose the book. This categorization causes massive headaches for publishers and libraries, who wrestle over the cost of e-book sales to the latter for the sake of providing enough digital copies of their books to readers. This categorization is also why libraries cannot lend out infinite copies of an e-book to their patrons; e-books are not standalone webpages that many people can visit all at once (like they may with this newsletter). Instead, they are individual instances of a digital text that are lent via what amounts to an access link or portal, and libraries have to purchase those individual access links.
Anyways, this was a detailed way of explaining that like libraries and publishers, the people in this article are fighting the wrong fight. An author receiving residuals from secondhand “sales” of an e-book would require a total overhaul of how we currently categorize e-books, as they are not covered by the First Sale Doctrine, and those secondhand “sales” would amount to subletting a text. It’s not clear how a user in this hypothetical crypto-book interface could legally resell their copy of a book. This section of the article signaled to me that none of these people know what they’re talking about. Case in point:
“We were really inspired by the ancient patronage model where the wealthy classes would support the arts so that everyone can access it,” says co-founder Amelie Lasker. Hoping to be the “great library for the metaverse,” the platform will launch with a small library of NFT books that anyone can read, but few can collect.
The history cited here is so sanitized it makes my nostrils burn, and once again proves that all the STEM kids who boasted about never taking a literature or history class after high school should not be trusted with anything. Wealthy patrons didn’t make the arts available to everyone. They patronized artists to make art for themselves. That art represented a narrow view of the world that we are actively trying to recover from; a pay-to-play model means that the wealthy get to decide what the rest of us see.
Secondly, such digital libraries already exist…without crypto. The Internet Archive and the Uncensored Library on Minecraft are two of my favorite examples of digitally-based, access-driven libraries. The documents on here are not “NFT books.” They’re PDFs. (What does “NFT book” even mean? How can a book be a non-fungible token, in the truest sense, that indicates the creation receipt of something online? Is the book the receipt of itself? My brain is being sucked down a toilet drain trying to parse this.)
Moreover, “anyone can read, but few can collect'' reinforces the exclusivity and elitism of collecting that is antithetical to aspirational practices in the field. If we have any chance at collective cultural recovery, collecting must be radically expansive and inclusive. We don’t need to create artificial limits on an already artificial notion of value to spur collecting. I’ve written about artificial scarcity a dozen times over and this is such a brazenly vacuous attempt to gin up false value for something. I’m begging literally any one of these people to talk to a librarian or a rare book dealer.
“We want to try different tiers,” Lasker says. “Maybe there's a more accessible, more affordable version where it's just the ebook, and then there's a more expensive version that has original art or some kind signature from the author—or a unique piece the author has written into it that's only for that one copy. That creates rare books.”
In case you want a refresher on why this statement raised a dozen red flags for me, I wrote about NFTs and the unavoidable reproducibility of digital artifacts a few months ago. Here, they claim that more expensive editions will merit such prices with original art, but price isn’t necessarily indicative of rarity. If they were to cap the number of people who could purchase those copies, that ostensibly creates scarcity. But copies of digital-born artifacts are indistinguishable from one another, rendering any criteria of “scarcity” as contributing to their “inherent” value worthless. You can make all the arguments you want about how NFTs reflect our current cultural moment and, consequently, merit whatever sticker price, but you can never claim scarcity as a legitimate factor.
I just covered a whole section on buying access codes to e-books, but on the other side of those portals, those e-books are not materially different from one another. You may ask, “But Shira, if software licensers currently create access codes to block people from accessing digital content, couldn’t this tier thing work?” Yeah, functionally, you can create ways to prevent the average person from accessing digital content via paywalls, but that does not resolve any of the issues of 1) digital reproducibility, 2) First Sale Doctrine, 3) falsified value, and 4) “why does it have to be cryptocurrency?” that undercut this model.
I feel slightly unhinged explaining all this, knowing that they know this is hogwash. The commentators in this article admit that the resale of digital goods and reproducibility of digital artifacts is a “tricky legal and philosophical problem…What is a ‘used’ book in this NFT marketplace?” Great question, it doesn’t exist, because digital copies of things are fundamentally indistinguishable from one another.3
the itty-bitty art-by-committee problem
Why would any author want to partake in this model? Griffin suggests that among the rewards for early investors could be the opportunity to direct where the story goes. The writer could “token-gate” a voting mechanism for plot points, character arcs, and world-building. (Such “voting mechanisms” are also known as “polls” and they exist on many subscriber-based websites, such as Patreon. A broken record, I am: we don’t need crypto for this.)
Authors already draw suggestions for their work from followers, most often in fanworks and fanfiction (take note of this, it will be important in Part 2); why would they willingly sacrifice a share of their compensation to an unknown group of early investors to accomplish what they are already doing? Griffin asks the same question, and the response is a mini-atom bomb: “‘Maybe the question should be: what kind of people, rather than authors.’”
This comment illustrates to me that the people promoting this technology are not convincingly interested in literature, developing ways for authors to earn fair compensation, or resolving myriad issues in the publishing industry. They are motivated by creating new profit streams for themselves using cryptocurrency. What kind of people are interested in this model? A Venn diagram of those who are already interested in crypto and those who are disinterested in engaging with literature without incentive and imagine that other people need incentive too.4
The additional risk here is that when fans don’t respond to this mode of doing things—that is, investing in a book with cryptocurrency—investors have reason to drop that author from their roster because there is not considerable return. We already see that this consumer-incentive model does not sustain quality art. Streaming services, for example, regularly axe popular shows because the fanbase didn’t grow or vocalize their love quickly enough. Warner Bros. Discovery came under fire just two weeks ago for stripping their digital library of many properties.5 They killed completed seasons of television shows that had not yet aired for the sake of a tax cut, citing “lack of popularity,” which is underhanded and insulting to both the creators and fans of those shows.
Let’s remember, Schitt’s Creek did not become a blockbuster until its sixth season! Imagine if PopTV had pulled the plug after season one. We never would have gotten David and Patrick, or the best-worst breakup scene between Alexis and regulation hottie Ted, or Stevie utterly crushing “Maybe this Time.” Art needs time, vision, and direction to grow. It does not need a hundred little voices pinging authors with their ideas because they paid a few (crypto)dollars to get a say. Art by committee has never worked out well: just consider any of the last ten unwatchable Marvel properties.6
These are startups with poor user interfaces, if they have platforms at all. None of them have published books yet, and their ideas appear to rehash existing features from a dozen other websites that accomplish the same goals of connecting creators with fans (without crypto). For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that all the legal, technical, and philosophical issues I raised were resolved, and some company built the tech for this, and it integrated an investment and payment interface, a hosting library, a resale hub, personal profiles, etc., and functioned. Would anyone show up?
Even half a century after the first ebook was launched and 15 years after the first Kindle was released, print books still outsell digital books. Granted, one might refer to this period as the “incunable” phase of digital books, referring to the nascent period of the European hand-press (1451ish to 1501). Griffin, to her credit, acknowledges this: none of the companies “solve one of the biggest challenges facing the publishing industry right now: finding readers.” One of her commentators notes that:
“Everyone wants an alternative to Amazon, and we're wondering if web3 provides an opportunity to make that alternative in a way that's financially viable.”
What kind of alternative to Amazon are we seeking, though? What has Amazon dominated? E-book sales? Book sales in general? People don’t want an alternative web-hosting platform where they still only rent digital versions of a text, they want an alternative to monopoly. This project completely misunderstands the assignment. The publishing industry wants to stop being skewered by Amazon’s price slashing; readers want to own the works they love, not rent it from media conglomerates; and authors want more agency. All of these require more competition, not some philosophically and legally compromised, inaccessible, and expensive model that few people can access. The fight here is not won by crypto, but by reclassifying e-books and redistributing wealth to authors.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
We’ll pick up next time with the second half of my beef: crypto and fandom.
Big news for National Treasure fans:
What I read last week: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.
What I’m currently reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. It felt like time for a nearly-Autumn Austen reread.
bird
More later.
I will concede that Shanti Escalante-De Mattei at ARTNews has done some of the most consistent reporting on crypto in the art and collecting world, and she recently wrote about how Ethereum, a crypto company, became significantly more environmentally friendly, which may quiet one of the most important criticisms of crypto. But it won’t quiet me!
I can hear someone saying, “But Shira, that’s what happens when you invest, you receive some means of return.” Fine. Still doesn’t justify the crypto element. We’re discussing a rarified form of asset control that is unavailable to the vast majority of people. Let’s stop pretending this democratizes art.
One of the people in this article runs a publishing startup called Readl. If nothing else, we must end the spate of start-ups with terrible names.
Reminds me of this Tumblr post: “We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don’t dream can’t comprehend.”
Property is the quickest word to the crux of the issue.
Martin Scorsese said it best, in his defense of his comment that Marvel (and all big blockbuster action films) are “theme parks,” not cinema: “That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
I can feel you fuming from my bed in NY