Bookchain® is a new, flexible, secure, and innovative way of publishing, distributing and selling ebooks.
We are excited to introduce you to new global internet selling platform that is secure and at the epicenter of the new age of economics – Cryptoeconomics for today’s global market.
This new selling platform will allow you to:
Keep more of your royalties
Keep your readers within your eco-system
Give your readers the best value and keep them coming back to your website
Expand your readership by adding a new global selling platform
Secure your intellectual property with blockchain technology
BOOKCHAIN IS A NEW SELLING PLATFORM FOR GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF E-BOOKS
Chanticleer Reviews is partnering with Bookchain, an innovative and secure platform that publishes and sells ebooks. The company’s encrypted blockchain technology empowers writers and publishers to protect their works from book piracy, illegal copying, and hacking. Bookchain’s platform is 100% cryptocurrency-free making it available to everyone.
Both organizations share the common goal of promoting authors and their works while enabling discoverability among readers. Bookchain’s digital ebook distribution platform allows readers the flexibility to easily download their books from any device as long as there is access to a web browser.
Bookchain is presenting the Blue Ribbon winners of the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBAs) with free uploading services on Bookchain’s easy to use digital ebook sales platform. In return, Chanticleer Reviews will link reviews from its website and digital magazine to any works that are available on the Bookchain distribution and sales platform. Bookchain and Chanticleer Reviews will jointly promote these works and will collaborate on social networks and at publishing industry events.
Bookchain® is a brand-new platform bringing a refreshingly flexible way to publish and distribute ebooks, based on blockchain technology. Bookchain was started in 2015 by Scenarex. The company is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec Province, Canada.
Through smart contracts, the platform enables the configuration of the security, trace-ability, attribution, and distribution settings of an ebook–even anthologies and compilations.
Endorsements
The Canada Media Fund has invested in Scenarex and its Bookchain solution.
Scenarex receives financial support from the Ministry Of Economie, Science et Innovation.
Scenarex receives financial support from the National Research Council Canada (NRC)
Scenarex created Bookchain®, the world’s only digital publishing platform built on blockchain technology without any cryptocurrency.
The first four things to know and understand about the Bookchain platform is:
You do NOT need cryptocurrency (aka Bitcoin, etc.) to sign up
You will NOT be paid in cryptocurrency (unless you want to)
You don’t need to know anything about blockchain
It is secure!
What is compelling about Bookchain is that your readers can download your book to read on multiple devices. They can also change devices frequently.
Readers can alternate reading your work on their smart phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop. Bookchain stores their library of books for them in the secure blockchain and allows them to access them wherever and whenever they have access to a web browser.
What is Blockchain? And Why Authors and Publishers Should Care
Any information (this includes books, novellas, short stories, graphics, photos, transactions…) that can be digitized can be recorded using blockchain technology. This digitized record can be referenced through a ledger entry on the intended blockchain platform which decentralizes it over its thousands of network nodes. Any time the blockchain is accessed it is timestamped with another block of digitized information.
As an author, the blockchain provides a way for you to securely publish your book andkeep control of your digital rights.It allows your published book to be treated more like a physical book, allowing your readers to own the digital book forever (as opposed to being allowed to checkout via Kindle).
You can keep your works up on other platforms too! (Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, PublishDrive, Draft2Digital, etc.)
But this is a great way to participate and learn about this new technology that is taking the publishing industry, commerce, and enterprise by storm.
“Bookchain® was specifically designed to fit the different needs of all those involved in the digital publishing industry. We created it to be fully adaptable to the reality of publishers, indie publishers, and self-publishing authors.”
And it is all about keeping book pirates at bay! And it happens more than you know!
Here are two articles by the award-winning Chanticleer Author Susan Faw. Susan experienced book piracy with her novels. You can read about it here with her three articles that she wrote to inform other Chanticleerians about this. At Digital Book World in September — it was a major concern and topic with piracy rates approaching 15%. Even the Big Four ar rattled by ebook piracy.
Bookchain is actively promoting the authors who have uploaded their books to Bookchain at the major book events around the globe!
This is a great way for your works to receive international exposure as they promote Bookchain at the most influential global book events.
To name a few:
Frankfurt Book Fair
London Book Fair
Book Expo of America
Digital Book World
and many more
Bookchain promoting the authors and their books that are uploaded to their platform.
PRICING and the Money Thing
There is a $39 USD deployment fee for each ebook title uploaded to Bookchain.*
*Members of The Roost at Chanticleer receive a discount code that will allow you to upload your books for just $10 a title (with verification).
WHAT IS THIS DEPLOYMENT FEE for? (the $39 bucks or $10 bucks with the Roost discount)
It includes hosting and securing the file, publication of the smart contract on the blockchain (which enforces the set parameters), the available data related to their digital book sale and the publication in our catalog.
* Note that this deployment fee includes hosting of the file, publication of the smart contract on the blockchain (which enforces the set parameters), the available data related to your digital book sale and the publication in our catalog.
Miscellaneous Fees
There is a fee of 42 cents USD for each digital book sold. This is a fixed fee per copy of digital books sold that includes the gas fee from Ethereum, regardless of the digital-book price. Scenarex does not collect a percentage of digital book sales.
The last fee is the transaction fee from STRIPE Connect which is $0.30 +0.0249% USD (of the transaction) per transaction. This includes the standard credit card fee and the payment processing which enables us to offer a cryptocurrency-free platform.
All transactions and monetary operations are handled by the STRIPE Connect payment platform integrated into Bookchain®. This integration is transparent for you and your customers.
STRIPE — is an online payment processing for internet business.
Royalty payments will be deposited directly into your bank account.
You can set up a Stripe account in minutes.
When and How Do I Receive Royalties from book sales from Bookchain?
The revenue from ebook sales, minus the Bookchain® miscellaneous fees, will be deposited automatically into your Stripe Connect Account and the Stripe Connect accounts of the contributors of the ebook (if applicable) on a monthly basis.
A New Year! A New Selling Platform!
Publish books on the blockchain… Don’t worry they make it easy!
How do I sign up for Bookchain
Just visit the website https://www.bookchain.ca/ and sign up.
If you have questions or issues they are extremely helpful. Just contact them.
In the days when piracy was the number one concern for seafaring merchants, ships were built with one purpose in mind—to repel attacks from pirates. It was thought that a floating fortress, and a crew as ruthless as those they faced, could protect the cargo stashed in the cavernous holds.
Painting by Ambroise Louis Garneray
Bristling with cannons, the Spanish and English galleons were thought to be untakable. The pirates soon convinced them otherwise, but by the time news reached the merchant houses in both nations, ships had been lost or commandeered, and their own guns turned on newly arriving ships. Soon, the pirates had captured so many ships, their flotillas outnumbered those of their prey.
Human beings were treated and traded as cargo, just as gold or silk, sugar or tea. All were equally valued by pirates, as booty for gain.
The island of Jamaica is just one example of a place that was populated by the pirate trade. The proceeds of piracy were traded on the market until the pirated cargo could no longer be traced to the stolen goods.
Today, books are stolen, given a new title and a new cover, and then resold in the publishing industry’s market place.
Our book baby is all grown up, just waiting to be stolen away by nefarious means, and resold on some island (read market), not of our choosing. How can we, the merchant owner of our books, protect our damsel/damoiseau in distress? How can we keep the pirates from raiding our ships, and stealing our coin?
According to Investopedia “blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, public ledger.”
The block is made up of three distinct structures.
The first aspect is that the block stores information about transactions, such as the dollar amount of a purchase, and the date and time it was purchased. This information is recorded in a ledger contained within the block.
The second aspect is that the block records the ‘who’ of the transaction. It keeps a record of the purchaser as a digitally encrypted signature, which is a permanent entry on the ledger.
The third aspect is that the block records each transaction as a unique feature called a hash. Every transaction within the block has its own unique coding. No two are alike.
Why is this relevant to your damsel/damoiseau in distress, you ask?
The biggest risk factor, to the distribution of any form of electronic art, is piracy. That is the ability for that work to be stolen. The oceans of digital publishing are ripe with pirates, who are happy to steal any e-book at any time.
But they don’t even need to go that far. We practically invite the pirates to steal our work, any time we give away or sell anything on the internet because there is nothing protecting the digital rights of that book. A few words of copyright in a manuscript do nothing to prevent your work from being reproduced in any currently known format, anywhere on the planet.
Once that book is “out there” there is no getting it back. Bye, bye, sweet damsel! Dare I say it again? Not to be outdone, you send cease and desist emails to every site that has your book baby illegally uploaded for sale. Of course, they ignore you. The pirate’s code trumps all.
Blockchain.
Digitalizing your book into blocks of code, blockchain has the power to prevent your work from being stolen. That pirate ship on the horizon will smack into a reef, impossible to cross. They may try to lob a few cannon shots at your ship, to no avail.
Book Pirates be Foiled!
The only way to get to your book IS TO PAY FOR IT. Isn’t that wonderful? What a novel concept, actually being paid for your work.
“But…what will keep them from reselling it once they have a copy?” you ask.
Ah, good question. Because blockchain is an encrypted source file, your entire book is encrypted. To access that work, you must have a key, a token, to unlock it. But the token can only be used by the purchaser. It will not work for anyone else. Web-based, blockchain books are read in browsers. Currently, this means that an internet connection is required. The book is owned by the purchaser, but it still exists virtually.
A book published in blockchain cannot be copied, resold, or redistributed in any manner. It can only be read by the purchaser, using the token given to them on purchase.
Other advantages to blockchain include being able to create digital limited editions, with serial numbers attached to them to confirm they are truly limited additions. These unique books could contain anything from visual and audio art and files, interviews, etc. Anything that can be digitalized, could become part of this unique format.
So, a book in blockchain cannot ever be resold?
Ah, well that power is in your control. As the owner of the rights to distribution (by virtue of it being block chained) you can authorize a book to be resold, under rights and terms that you set. For example, let’s say that a customer bought a $50.00 limited edition from you. You could make it part of the blockchain code that resales are permitted, but that 50% of every resale comes to you. The blockchain, because of the unique coding attached to the original transaction, will know that it is that exact copy being resold and enforce the 50% deposit to your account when the transaction occurs.
If this is such a wonderful technology, why isn’t everyone using it?
Blockchain first came into being in 1991. As with all new technologies, it has to be tested and tried, before becoming mainstream. As it moves into its third decade of existence, the world of commerce is paying attention. Start-up companies, such as Bookchain, are cropping up and will be the wave of the future. As more and more of these types of companies appear in the market place, the retail organizations will be forced to adopt the technology.
I see pressure coming from the big five publishing houses, as they look for better ways to protect their investments.
Blockchain Could Put Authors At Center of Publishing Universe
The Alliance of Independent Authors (Chanticleer Reviews is a vetted partner member of ALLi) agrees:
“If this decentralized technology fulfills its promise, the outcome could be a creator-led publishing industry.
While indie authors, and the companies that serve them, are a growing presence and power in publishing, large corporate intermediaries such as Amazon still stand between authors and their readers and dominate the self-publishing marketplace. Blockchain tech may help to build the road that leads to true independence for self-publishers.” April 2018 – London Book Fair
Change comes with a cost, and the big retailers will be reluctant to embrace such technologies, as they make money off of the pirates as surely as those island ports of old. Change will have to be forced on them.
E-book piracy can be combated, we only need the sword of technology in hand and move forward.
Read the first two articles of this series by Susan Faw by clicking the links below:
Piracy—Not Just on the High Seas Part 1 of 3 by Susan Faw
Sailing along – making great time! Fair waves and following seas! All is good!
Your book baby is still alive and has weathered its first month on the rough seas of self-publishing. The holds of your ship are taking on coin. The sky is blue, the waves choppy, and for the most part you have beat back the sharks.
You got this, right?
Month two arrives, and the crest of the wave you have been sailing vanishes. Your sales drop. You attempt to prop up those sales by spending some of that hard-earned gold in the hold, on flags to fly atop your central mast. Surely everyone will see your flag and flock to it, to buy your book baby.
Month two expires and with it, your sales. Your ship takes on water and sinks, as it sails over the sixty-day new release cliff, leaving you with one oar on a shrinking raft.
Sharks are everywhere!
This close-up view of the seas shows you the truth. The sharks were swimming below the surface and already made off with the coin that should have been tumbling into your sea chests. Your book has been pirated, and no one is paying attention to the wildly flapping flag, tied to the peak of your tattered sales. (See what I did there? 😊)
Before you sink into obscurity you try one last time, to stopper the holes sliced into the deck by the shark’s fins. You throw money at every advertising platform you have ever heard, spending the last of your once-shiny piles of gold to prop up your sales. Not to be outdone, you send cease and desist emails to every site that has your book baby illegally uploaded for sale. Of course, they ignore you. The pirate’s code trumps all.
Nothing you do can save you. You decide to ignore the pirates because there is nothing you can do about it.
Depressing, eh?
There must be a better way, right?
What can a lonely self-published author do to prevent the theft of their hard work, and sink the pirate ships before they can even toss a grappling hook into your manuscript?
Are you ready to hear about one possible future for publishing?
Then read on.
Cryptocurrency. Let’s break down that term.
According to Dictionary.com, “Crypto” comes from the Greek word Kryptos, which means “secret, or hidden.” The English language derives the word ‘crypt’ from this root word.
The word “currency” has a wider range of definitions, which all help to illustrate its meaning. “something that is used as a medium of exchange; money,” and “the fact or quality of being widely accepted and circulated from person to person,” and the British dictionary also defines it as “the act of being passed from person to person.”
Cryptocurrency is a hidden form of exchange, defined as “a digital currency or decentralized system of exchange that uses advanced cryptography for security.” Simply put, cryptocurrency is a hidden form of currency that is able to be passed from person to person in complete security.
“But wait,” you say, “cryptocurrency isn’t coin. It isn’t even touchable. It exists only in cyberspace. How does that work?”
I am so glad you asked.
The beauty of a cryptocurrency universe is that the pirates can’t get to it.
It’s not floating around in some bank (ship’s hold), waiting to be stolen by a card skimmer or password bot, nor is it in grandma’s safe bolted to the basement floor, or held in an investment firm’s dubious clutches, where sticky fingers skim coin all too often.
Cryptocurrency is held virtually and is not in any one place. The currency itself is decentralized and encrypted. There is no Fort Knox to break into. There is no place to send a trojan horse, to sneak behind the secure walls.
Instead, the currency is distributed in code bits across servers located around the world. At last count, the number of cryptocurrency servers numbered over twenty thousand.
Cryptocurrency is riding the wild seas of any startup, but there is no doubt that it is here to stay.
As the currency gains in popularity and is adopted by more and more companies, it will become one more way to pay for goods and services in this digital age. I dare say that in time, it will become the currency to which all “paper” forms of currency are tied. It will become the central pillar to which all regional currencies are pegged like the USD is used for now. But no nation wants to be tied to another nation’s rise and fall, for their own currency values. Anyone outside of the United States understands this point of pain.
And payments made with cryptocurrency are more secure than any form of payment we presently use. No one can steal the currency as it is not laying around to be stolen. Transactions are secure because they are undertaken by large mathematical calculations that only computers can solve.
What does this mean for you, as an author, you ask?
It means, that in the near future, cryptocurrency will be a way of digitally selling and receiving payment for our books, that cannot be corrupted or stolen by an outside party.
But wait, what about the books themselves? They can still be stolen, right?
…. And that is the perfect segue to the last article in this series by Susan Faw:
“Chaining Piracy: How To Save Your Damsel / Damoiseau In Distress”
