Maker Review

BOOK.IO

Welcome to the 10th episode of MAKER review!
location
Berlin/Dallas
calendar
July 28, 2022
Maker Review
Book Collage
Book Collage

Greetings, NMKR community! We are delighted to have a special guest with us this time: Josh Stone, CEO of Book.IO. Book is building an NFT marketplace for buying and selling eBooks and audiobooks. We want to learn more about this project, so let's get started!

NMKR: What inspired you to start developing Book? Please tell us what makes it so special.

Josh: I actually started talking about putting books on the blockchain way back in 2017, when we were at a previous eBook startup. After we sold that company, I really couldn’t shake the idea. I’d look at my digital bookshelf, which has a future value of $0, and think, “But what if I actually owned these?” I started down the path to learn everything I could about blockchain, and then started piecing the team together. We should own our digital books, and this idea was inevitable.

Our NFTs are a new category of assets called DEAs, or Decentralized Encrypted Assets. This allows us to store all types of media on chain, and only the NFT owner can view the contents. We believe this is the future of utility for Web3.

NMKR: What are the major challenges you're facing right now? We would like to know about your team's plans to overcome them.

Josh: Most of the challenges we are facing right now are all good ones, sparked by the success of our launch. On our first day, we sold around 100K USD of eBooks, and this obviously got the attention of publishers and the crypto world. Right now, we’re scaling operations, legal, and the team. There is a huge demand for NFT books, so we’re diligently working on ways to run more efficiently and scale so we can onboard millions of eBooks/Audiobooks.

NMKR: What are you doing to get people to use or invest in your project? Please share some thoughts about your growth strategy.

Josh: We’re builders, so our strategy is to build something that is much better than our centralized predecessors. Books are a new category in NFTs, so we have more demand than we can handle right now. But we’re meeting with investors, trying to find the right fit so we can grow rapidly while focusing on our mission, to decentralize and incentivize knowledge. It’s an exciting period at Book Token and the Cardano community has been amazing supporters. Cardano now has something no other chain has, and people are rallying.

Ben Illian (Left) with Joshua Stone (Right)

NMKR: What do you think about NMKR? Tell us what we can do for you in the long run so we both win!

Josh: NMKR is great because they share our same vision - bringing the promise of Web3 to the masses through utility, decentralization, security, and ownership. They’re asking the same questions as we are - “how do we get 100M people into crypto through utility?” But they aren’t just asking the question, they’re actively looking to help platforms like ours, and their experience in this space is much appreciated when we have meetings together.

NMKR: What's your vision for the future of blockchain/decentralized technologies like Cardano? Please tell us what you're doing to make that future a reality.

Josh: We imagine a world with 1 billion digital readers who actually own their books, get rewarded with $BOOK as they read, and can sell their books at any moment. Cardano, in our minds, is the top blockchain that can scale to that level and still keep the economics necessary to compete with the big centralized tech companies. And we’re gonna keep building, and overcoming obstacles until that future is a reality. We’re having too much fun to do anything else.

NMKR: We are always keen on supporting and championing new ideas that have the potential to change the status quo. We are excited to see what you will achieve next!

Stay up-to-date by following Book on:

Website - Book.io

Twitter - @book_io

Make sure to follow NMKR too!

Linkedin - NMKR.IO

Twitter - @nmkr_io

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