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
Blockchain is the foundation of a New Era of the Internet —
“Publishing is at the epicenter of digital disruption.” Paul Michelman, MIT & MIT Sloan.
Why is blockchain important for commerce and business (and, lest we forget, publishing is business)?
Because
It is a persistent, transparent, and its end goal is to cut down on middlemen, which is considered to be the new age of economics – Cryptoeconomics.
“Cryptoeconomics” is the practical science of building distributed systems, where properties of those systems are secured by financial incentives, and where the economic mechanisms are guaranteed by cryptography. It is the general term for the practice of designing and scaling blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Bookchain by Scenarex utilizes Ethereum for its digital bookselling platform. We will circle back around to Bookchain and Ethereum. But first, join me as I explore blockchain to try to understand this technology that is shaping the publishing industry.
Blockchain is a type of internet network that runs on hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. There are dozens of blockchain internet network platforms running 24/7 globally. And, yes, blockchain was invented to support bitcoin transactions. However, it is now being utilized for recording many different types of information.
As for real-world applications, here is one that validates blockchain technology commercial use:
Deloitte (a “Big Four” accounting organization) recently surveyed 1,000 companies across seven countries about integrating blockchain into their business operations. Their survey found that 34% already had a blockchain system in production today, while another 41% expected to deploy a blockchain application within the next 12 months. In addition, nearly 40% of the surveyed companies reported they would invest $5 million or more in blockchain in the coming year. – Investopedia
Blockchain is a digital ledger on all platforms. Blockchain apps act as a third party and allow us to trade one-on-one but on a global scale.
Arizona’s Electronic Transactions Act 2017
“‘Blockchain technology means distributed ledger technology that uses a distributed, decentralized, shared and replicated ledger, which may be public or private, permissioned or permissionless, or driven by tokenized crypto economics or tokenless. The data on the ledger is protected with cryptography, is immutable and auditable and provides an uncensored truth.”
It is decentralized. It isn’t controlled by any government or company.
As we prepare to head into the third decade of blockchain, it’s no longer a question of “if” legacy companies will catch on to the technology — it’s a question of “when.” – Investopedia
[ Editor’s Note: In 2020, just a half a year away, Facebook is planning on launching its own cryptocurrency, Libra, on its own blockchain platform called Calibra. Whether are not that platform will be decentralized is a concern—a major concern. Google is also planning on launching BigQuery – with its own cryptocurrency. ]
Reread:It is decentralized. It isn’t controlled by any government or company that is until Facebook and Google have their own platforms…Amazon can’t be far behind…
Are you with me so far…?
Blockchain = a block of digital information that is stored in a public database known as the chain.
Illustration from Blockchain Simply Explained
Each digital record is a “block.” Changes can only be made to the “block” by adding new information to the end that references previous transactions on that particular block. Each change is called a “hash.” Each block of information is added by a chain.
A “hash” is a unique fingerprint for each bit of added information to the chain of information (blocks)
Rubygarage.org
WHY, again, am I reading this article?
The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited (or hacked or pirated). This is what makes blockchain a natural for ebook distribution.
For our purposes, we are going to discuss Ethereum, the world’s leading programmable blockchain app.
Now to circle back around to Bookchain by Scenarex and Ethereum. Bookchain uses Ethererum for its digital bookselling platform.
COOL TIP > check out Eretheum just to see this new type of artwork called NFT (non-fungible token –NFTs also find potential use in digital art, by helping prove authenticity and ownership.) I don’t quite understand what it is, but the graphic is fun to watch as it morphs on the Ethereum.org site. Blockchain has given rise to this new form of graphics and art. And allows the creators to benefit from their works.
This logo joins together the artwork of five artists. You can see this artwork in motion at Eretheum.org @liliashka lead the art project.
The Ethereum community is the largest and most active blockchain community in the world. It includes core protocol developers, cryptoeconomic researchers, cypherpunks, mining organizations, ETH holders, app developers, ordinary users, anarchists, fortune 500 companies, and individuals.
There is no company or centralized organization that controls Ethereum. Ethereum is maintained and improved over time by a diverse global community of contributors who work on everything from the core protocol to consumer applications. This website, just like the rest of Ethereum, was built – and continues to be built – by a collection of people working together.
As of February 1, 2018, Ethereum was running on approximately 28,000 nodes (computers across the globe). That number has significantly increased in 2019.
Ethereum is a global, open-source platform for decentralized applications. On Ethereum, you can write code that controls digital value, runs exactly as programmed, and is accessible anywhere in the world.
Now, we can say that Ethereum is decentralized. It isn’t controlled by any government or company.
Ethereum is a foundation for a new era of the internet that utilizes blockchain technologies:
An internet where money and payments are built in.
An internet where users can own their data, and your apps don’t spy and steal from you.
An internet where everyone has access to an open financial system.
An internet built on neutral, open-access infrastructure, controlled by no company or person.
Are you still with me…?
“…attacks are further thwarted because the cost of changing the contents of old blocks is compounded by each new block that gets added to the chain. When a new block is made, it contains the hash of the one before it. Any changes in old blocks will result in invalid hashes for all subsequent blocks. In that lock analogy, it’s as though the design for the lock at the end of the chain depends on all the locks that came before it. So changing one lock in the middle of the blockchain means having to find new keys for every lock after it.” IEEE SPECTRUM
“Ensuring irreversibility becomes necessary only when you invite anyone and everyone to take part in the curation of a ledger.” This is why blockchain technology platforms run on tens of thousands of nodes and computers. The information is decentralized, thereby making it almost impossible to steal, alter, or lose.
Blockchain
Why authors and publishers should care about blockchain
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 and keep 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).
How do I get my book published on a blockchain platform?
There are a couple of different companies out there that provide the front end support to get your book published on the blockchain.
Bookchain utilizes the Eretheum blockchain to create a brand-new platform bringing a refreshingly flexible way to publish and distribute ebooks, based on blockchain technology. Through smart contracts, the platform enables the configuration of the security, traceability, attribution, and distribution settings of an ebook.
The first four things to know and understand about the Bookchain platform are:
You do NOT need cryptocurrency (aka Bitcoin, etc.) to sign up
You will NOT be paid in cryptocurrency (unless you want to)
It is endorsed and underwritten by the Canada Media Fund, NRC, and the Canada Ministry of Economie.
It is secure!
Why are we so into Bookchain?
We became interested in Bookchain when one of OZMA Grand Prize winners, Susan Faw, informed us that she is now publishing on Bookchain because her books were pirated! Yes, pirated!
Read about how and what happened to her and her published works here (from her blog posts on Chanticleer Reviews):
Join us on the High SEAS to the New Territories of DIGITAL BOOK PUBLISHING
Sailing – making great time! Fair waves and following seas! All is good!
What are your experiences? What are your thoughts?
Do let us know!
Links to Resources Used and Quoted in this Article:
I have listed a few of the Youtube videos that I watched while trying to understand this new technology. They discuss what makes blockchain hard to hack and the concept of “consensus” that allows blockchain to exist. Stay tuned as we ride the waves of blockchain!
(This is a three article series exploring the ever-expanding issue of book piracy.)
It is every fledgling author’s dream to see their book published. The time spent writing and rewriting, editing and polishing your book, are unpaid months and in some cases, yearsof toil, never to be recovered.
Release day cannot come quick enough, whether you are independently publishing, or are on a more traditional path. The day your book goes live is akin to a wedding day, or the birth of a child, a momentous, long anticipated date that greeted with joy.
Sending your book baby out into the world is a perilous event. This child of your brain is set adrift on retail rafts, in the hope that it won’t drown, and sink into obscurity. You think that drowning is the worst thing that can happen, that no one will notice your novel and that it will disappear from view.
Actually, the worst thing that can happen is that your book is a runaway success—at least with how the publishing industry is currently structured.
You see, that ocean is full of sharks. The sharks of the publishing ocean will plagiarize your work. They will copy it and stuff it into books that they create, and slap a cover on it and upload it to Amazon, stealing your words and your income. But plagiarism has always existed in the world. They do get caught and the books are taken down.
Worse than the sharks are the pirates. Flying international flags of privilege and self-aggrandizement, these modern-day pilferers go far beyond nibbling at your work. Cruising the waters to see what rafts have popular cargo, they pounce on those books fortunate enough to be successful. They outright steal your book baby, stuffing the loot into storefronts of their own, without a penny of that work being returned to the author and/or publisher.
According to a recent article of The Guardian: “All this is exhausting for authors, but it could be devastating for readers, too. Harris, a representative of the SoA who speaks passionately on behalf of authors, knows several who have lost contracts because piracy drove down their sales to an unsustainable level. The most vulnerable authors are those who write series: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book three could end up dead in the water. Midlist authors and those who barely scrape a living are also at risk. “These people mistakenly think they’re sticking it to the man,” Harris says. “They’re not; they’re sticking it to the little people, the people who are struggling … and they don’t care.”
And the numbers of illegal downloads of pirated ebooks are staggering.
The website GoodEreader states: “Pirate websites received 300 billion visitors last year and ebooks represent a small, but growing segment. Digimarc and Nielsen conducted a recent study that reveals 41% of all adult e-book pirates are aged between 18 and 29 but perhaps surprisingly, 47% fall into the 30 to 44-year-old bracket. The remaining 13% are aged 45 or up. There are also some surprises when it comes to pirates’ income. Cost is often cited as a factor when justifying downloading for free, and this study counters that the average household income that downloads books the most range from $60,000 and $99,000.”
“Ebook piracy is not just popular in the United States, but is a global problem,” according to the Intellectual Property Office. Their latest study of online copyright infringement finds that “seventeen percent of ebooks read online in the UK are pirated – around 4m books. According to research by Dutch firm GfK, only 10% of all German ebooks on devices were actually paid for, with most of the digital books being pirated. On average, an e-reader in the Netherlands holds on average 117 ebooks. Out of that total, 11 were bought at legitimate websites. The remaining books were pirated at file-sharing sites or through Torrent sites. Ninety-two percent of ebook readers in Russia obtained their books illegally downloading the materials.”
I bet you are not feeling so cozy over your amazingly successful book launch now, are you? But this series of articles is not meant to be discouraging.—
In fact, there are promising signs for the future of e-book publishing. In this swiftly changing digital age, you can stay one step ahead of the pirates, with some careful planning. In the next article, we will explore ways to protect your digital copyright, and budding technologies you need in your arsenal, to help protect you, and your book baby from pirates.
