0:00

Hey,

0:00

before we get started today, make sure you check

0:02

out the new podcast that Travis and myself

0:04

are doing all about artificial intelligence.

0:07

It's called What Else? The Bad AI

0:09

Show. And you can go listen now at badai.show.

0:15

While many are focused on the financial use

0:17

cases for blockchain, others are building

0:19

out tech to utilize blockchain to

0:21

make things we do better. In 2019,

0:24

people around the world spent over $250 billion on

0:26

books. Understanding

0:30

how people purchase and consume the written word

0:33

provides us with a use case begging

0:35

for a better mousetrap. Today we

0:37

welcome Joshua Stone, CEO and

0:39

co-founder of book.io

0:42

to the show to discuss the future of books.

0:45

This is especially interesting to Travis and

0:47

myself as we're both published authors.

0:49

So listen, watch or read

0:52

along on our sponsored episode number 678

0:54

of the Bad Crypto Podcast.

1:22

Welcome

1:27

to

1:27

the Bad Crypto Podcast, the show for the

1:29

crypto curious, the crypto serious and

1:32

today the book nerds Joel Comm here

1:34

and Sir Lord Travis Wright, other book nerd

1:37

over there. That's true between

1:39

Joel and I, I believe we've written 16 books. Joel's

1:43

written about 15 of those. So

1:45

gotta catch up. is

1:47

really, really good. So, so

1:50

there's

1:51

that some of mine, some of mine are bad. But

1:53

by the way, way, you know, you say that all the time, but you

1:56

don't mention the 25 eBooks that

1:59

also. it. Well, my God, we never

2:01

even discussed that. That's what that's

2:03

so it's a collectively folks collectively,

2:06

we have written 42 books. Now

2:08

I need to go count and find out how many actually

2:10

so

2:15

I can have an extra extra count of that. Yeah,

2:18

I'm working on I'm gonna work on a new book. I'm working

2:20

on a new book. We're going to discuss that too. Today. So let's

2:22

go. Yeah, your new book is going

2:24

to be how to write 42 books with AI

2:26

and in one sitting

2:29

so I can write all your books and how to write with copy

2:31

with with Ghost writers. So it's good. I mean, it's kind

2:33

of AI is kind of a ghost writer. It's like a super

2:35

ghost writer. Well, you guys, we get

2:37

a lot of email and a lot of pitches

2:40

to us

2:40

for people wanting to be on

2:42

the show. And many times people are saying,

2:44

hey, we'll pay you money to come on your show.

2:47

It's been a long time. It's

2:49

very rare that we have taken money

2:52

from anybody to do a sponsored episode.

2:54

And the way we, uh, we look

2:56

at it as, Hey, if somebody is a guest on

2:58

the show and they bring a ton of value, and

3:00

then there's an, Oh, by the way, this is

3:02

my website. That's not sponsored material.

3:04

That's pure content. But when somebody comes on

3:06

and they've got a great product and we think it's

3:08

great and we want to bring it to you, then

3:11

it becomes a sponsored interview. So to

3:13

disclose fully and completely, we

3:15

are being compensated for this interview today,

3:17

but we have vetted this project. We

3:19

like what we see. We like the dude we're

3:21

about to welcome to the show. And

3:24

with that, we're going to bring the CEO

3:26

and co founder of check out this domain

3:29

book IO his name is Joshua

3:31

stone. He's got over 25 years in

3:33

the tech industry. And many

3:35

of those in the publishing industry revolutionizing

3:39

how we purchase and consume

3:41

book material. Josh, welcome,

3:44

sir to the bad crypto podcast. Thanks.

3:46

Thanks for having me guys. A big, big fan.

3:48

Great treat to sit down and talk with you both.

3:51

Well,

3:51

it's a treat for us and your background

3:53

is a treat. We have behind us AI

3:56

variations of our,

3:58

our books. you have

4:00

a real world variation

4:02

of your studio behind you. They're

4:05

actually the digital books

4:07

that we've done, but in print form. So kind

4:10

of the reverse.

4:10

So let's start with this, Josh. What

4:13

is broken

4:14

in the book industry

4:17

that needs it to

4:19

even have a blockchain solution to make it better?

4:22

That's

4:22

a good question. So if

4:24

you buy a book today, a digital book from from

4:26

an online retailer, write a Kindle

4:28

or an iBooks, either an ebook or an

4:30

audio book. You don't actually buy that

4:32

book. What you're buying is a license just

4:34

to view it. So if you unsubscribe

4:37

from that platform, move

4:40

away from it, you lose all access

4:42

to your books. And with that licensing

4:45

agreement as well, what you're really agreeing to, if you look in

4:47

the fine print is the publisher, the author,

4:49

or even the retailer can go in and take that book

4:51

off your shelf.

4:52

This is kind of the recent stuff

4:54

that's happened where they've gone in and like

4:56

changed books to, you know, make

4:58

them more woke or whatever, but they can change contents

5:00

of books. Yeah, I noticed that like 1984,

5:03

the book changed and they got rid of certain parts

5:05

of it. There was a bunch of other sort of banned

5:07

books that are like that you can't even

5:09

have it in your Kindle. They changed.

5:12

They actually changed 1984 itself. I

5:16

mean, does that not recall they changed some

5:18

some stuff in there to make it more woke or. That's

5:20

irony on display. Actually, Joel,

5:23

actually 1984, the book, it never existed. it. Did

5:25

you not know that's figment

5:27

of your imagination. So it's kind

5:29

of wild how that can actually happen. Joshua,

5:31

how ownership is not

5:34

true ownership. It's,

5:36

it's like you're paying to use a digital

5:38

library. Essentially, if that's the case,

5:40

if they can delete you from accessing

5:43

your books that you bought or your audio books

5:45

that you you don't actually own them. That's one reason

5:47

why Joel and I were like, wow, this book,

5:49

this book platform, if it's done correctly,

5:52

and I think it's a lot of it's still kind of early

5:54

UX and there's some early stuff going on. But the

5:56

functionality is there. It reminds

5:58

me, like last night I was. playing

6:00

with it. You go to book.io,

6:03

you connect your wallet, and then

6:05

you can read a book. And it looks

6:07

to me like if I'm looking at it online,

6:09

which I wasn't using my phone or anything, it

6:11

looks to me like I was using the online

6:14

Kindle reading version of it, right? Because the

6:16

book looks like a print book, it's

6:18

still kind of got that look and feel. But

6:20

it but but I could actually just read it right

6:22

from my desktop on the browser. Yeah,

6:25

I mean, the interesting thing when you really like I I

6:27

guess kind of backing up just a little bit, we

6:29

have a history in books I do. And

6:32

I've been a big fan of crypto for a

6:34

long time. And so as I started to think about

6:36

kind of what, you know, going back to your question, Joel, about what's

6:38

broken, it's like there is

6:40

this issue. But really, like when you get deeper

6:43

into it, it's like we don't actually own the digital

6:45

assets that we buy. Right. So it's like we've

6:47

seen this with crypto and in a tease and I've participated

6:50

in all that for years when

6:53

it sort of occurred to us, you know, books

6:55

and music and movies are sort of the same way, right?

6:58

I purchased them,

6:59

but I don't, I'm really just like leasing

7:02

them or buying like access.

7:05

Yeah, you know, as I talked to my son,

7:08

who's a big gamer, this is one of his

7:10

big beefs with the gaming industry. It's the

7:12

same thing, you know, used to be you'd go buy

7:14

a box software, you'd

7:17

have the floppy disks, you would have a physical

7:19

possession and you would install

7:21

it on your computer. And when you're done with it, you box

7:23

it back up with the disks and the manuals in there

7:25

you could sell it to somebody and then you

7:27

reap the benefits. Now you're buying

7:30

a license to the game and

7:32

you're in their environment. If they ever decide to shut

7:34

down their multiplayer servers,

7:35

which some have done recently, then

7:37

all of a sudden your, your game, at least

7:40

that aspect of it is worthless. So

7:42

it is, it is a broken system.

7:45

And so blockchain fixes this how,

7:48

not that I don't know the answer, but I want you to say

7:50

it. Yeah. So we do things

7:53

a little bit differently than, than the current sort

7:55

of NFT space. So we use

7:57

NFTs as a form of, you know.

8:00

validating the ownership component,

8:02

but the actual, the, and the entire guts

8:04

of the book itself are completely decentralized. So

8:06

we, we take a book, um, art

8:09

file, we, we break it apart into lots of little

8:11

chunks. All those are encrypted. All those

8:13

are stored in decentralized storage. And

8:15

then our DAP reader, uh, basically

8:18

verifies that you own that. And then it streams in

8:20

those bits and re-encrypt some and reassembles

8:22

it so you can read the content. So unlike, you

8:24

know, traditional NFT where everything is public

8:27

and there's been some other kind of early like predecessors

8:29

of this where they've put

8:31

out something as a book, but

8:33

really you can still go and view just

8:36

a PDF file or an EPUB file uploaded

8:39

to IPFS. So we really started to

8:41

think about it in terms of just with our background

8:43

from the publishing side, how do we overlay

8:45

a DRM, like a digital rights management

8:48

system over top of this so that

8:50

the content is truly encrypted

8:53

and protected, which is what publishers

8:56

and labels and studio houses, it's

8:58

what they can't give all of their contents

9:00

away for free. That's why they're trying to push them through all these

9:03

streaming services. So we sort

9:05

of changed that and say, let's

9:07

use the NFT as a component of it. So we've

9:10

formed a new type

9:12

of asset that we call a

9:15

decentralized encrypted asset. We call them

9:17

DEAs for short. And that sort of holds

9:21

the entire asset

9:24

and all the components that create and

9:26

build it. So you truly own it. It can't

9:29

be changed. It's written to the blockchain. It's unburnable.

9:32

It's unbanable. This is great

9:34

too, because then we can penetrate countries where books

9:37

are not accessible, right? We can

9:39

get them into the blockchain. And we've seen

9:41

that happen actually, and some cool instances.

9:43

So yeah, it's way different than

9:46

the current system.

9:50

I think it's really fascinating. And

9:53

I was talking to Joel about this. Once

9:56

we started chatting with you, I was like, you know,

9:58

I was thinking of this as that. have so

10:00

many books that I bought like on my books. I just

10:02

moved to a new place here a couple years ago. So I didn't move

10:04

a lot of my books. I just bought new

10:07

ones that were relevant that I wanted. And I was like,

10:09

you know, I

10:09

bet I've personally read maybe 20%

10:14

of the books that I've gotten on my shelves and

10:16

most of my haven't bought. I go, what would be so

10:18

cool to me is if it was almost like

10:20

books were like an album. And

10:22

I was like, here's the album. Here are the 14 chapters of this

10:26

particular album, or book

10:28

and you can go and buy the first one or

10:30

maybe they give you the first one for free and

10:32

then you go. Oh, I loved it. I read it.

10:35

I'm going to keep it going. So having mechanisms

10:37

in there to buy a book by chapter

10:40

instead of by the whole property

10:43

or maybe having it as an NFT. That's

10:45

a holder that says there's 14 slots

10:47

in here because there's 14 chapters and you can you

10:50

can buy them all and they can combine. Is that

10:52

something you guys are working on or thinking on? I know we've had

10:54

some conversations offline about some things, but

10:57

what's an official something something around that

10:59

that you guys are working on. Yeah,

11:01

so you're exactly right.

11:04

Like serialization of content is very interesting,

11:06

right? Because we can, what we

11:08

really built, right? Is like what exists currently is there's

11:10

just an EPUB file and it's a book. What we've done

11:12

is really created a way where it's like a programmable

11:14

book. So it can do a lot of different things. So in

11:17

that instance, right? From a serialized standpoint,

11:19

it could be that where you buy individual chapters,

11:22

or you could buy a subscription in

11:24

effect to that book as like a primary token.

11:27

and then you just receive airdrops of those chapters

11:29

as they're written. So we've done some

11:31

experiments like this already where also

11:33

with some like book series, right? So if you own,

11:35

you know, book one, two, and three,

11:38

you automatically receive book four if you're holding

11:40

those earlier copies, right? So there's

11:42

just a ton of different ways you can like merchandise and

11:44

market and like really change the way

11:47

that you receive books and how they're distributed.

11:49

There's a lot going on here, both for

11:52

consumers and for creators. And

11:55

on this platform itself, you've got

11:58

a store, you've got a token. I'm

12:00

going to go ahead and share the screen for those that are watching

12:02

on the video. Why don't you kind of go ahead

12:04

and walk us through how this actually works? Yeah,

12:08

for sure.

12:09

Um, so, uh, yes, let's see what we're looking

12:11

at here. Um, is basically our, our page of all the stuff

12:14

that's, that's coming up. Um,

12:16

so we released right now to three different

12:19

blockchains. Like our, our

12:21

goal from a creator standpoint is to be blockchain agnostic. So

12:24

creator can deploy to any chain they want.

12:27

So we, um, we started off with a, we started off with a,

12:29

we started off with Cardano, which is

12:31

a little unusual, but we were very

12:34

adept and Haskell. So it was an easy, an

12:36

easy entrance. We've deployed

12:39

to Ethereum and to

12:41

Polygon as well. And then we're in the process

12:43

of our fourth blockchain, which we're super excited

12:46

about. We're going to debut that at Consensus

12:48

this year. So,

12:50

you know, there's a bunch of different books in here. In

12:53

our instance, what we've done too, right, is like,

12:56

kind of going back to your, you guys pointed about, I

12:58

think Julie said, you know, 42 books, right? You

13:01

have no way to see, even if you owned all 42 of those

13:03

books, like what your, what your bookshelf would

13:05

be worth in real time. Right? So like, since

13:08

we have the ability now to have

13:10

these sell on a secondary, secondary markets,

13:13

we can get pricing information. So all of them have

13:17

like a rare, we do a rarity chart for each book. We

13:21

use some different AI artists and we

13:23

develop a bunch of different covers. So there's

13:25

sort of a whole system from the collectible side.

13:27

And then we've started to move more into a

13:29

mass production side, right? Where there's like, it's, it's

13:32

much more like a, a print book where there's

13:34

a single cover. Um, we just

13:36

did this recently with wizard of Oz, um, on

13:38

polygon, there's a single cover and then there's

13:40

like a huge amount of units, but then the price

13:42

point is really low, right? Because we're wanting to demonstrate

13:45

is the, you know, there is a

13:47

collectible side, just like if I went in a physical bookstore,

13:49

right? I go in a physical bookstore, most of

13:51

it's just like mass produced stuff. And then there's this kind

13:53

of small, like rare collectible sections. So

13:56

we can do that same exact thing with with blockchain.

13:58

We have, are all to rare collectible

14:00

stuff like our Alison wonderland was

14:02

our first release on Ethereum over

14:05

to this side where there's just a single

14:08

cover and there's you know, and it's an entire

14:10

book. And really the purpose is just

14:12

to say that, you know, there's a bigger utility

14:15

here, right? That was just like too matic, right? It's really

14:17

cheap. Some of the more expensive ones,

14:19

because those are maybe out of copyright, because it's

14:21

been over 75 years. So some of those early

14:23

ones were able, you're able to go out there and kind

14:26

of grab those and purpose them in your

14:28

way.

14:29

Yeah. So it's funny as we started with, uh,

14:31

we launched last July, July, 2022, and we

14:33

started with

14:36

public domain books because you know, they're,

14:38

they're free and there's no copyright issue around it. So we were

14:40

like, let's generate some cool art. And, and

14:42

we were really just trying to build a mass

14:44

collection of books to go back and talk to all of our

14:46

publishing partners. And what happened was like

14:49

all of them sold out in like seconds.

14:51

And then it started this thing where we had, you

14:54

know, a growing kind of audience. It was great. every

14:56

time we put a book out, everything would just sort of sell

14:58

out like almost instantaneously. Uh, and

15:01

I love that how this one right here has, there's a thousand

15:03

books and there you got 157 unique book covers

15:05

and then 97 of them

15:10

are a one of ones. So if you got that book

15:12

cover, that's a unique book cover

15:14

that in F like your book could

15:16

literally go from being a liability

15:18

sitting on your bookshelf

15:19

to becoming a freaking awesome

15:21

asset.

15:23

Yeah. 100%. We've had a, like our,

15:25

I think our highest sell was around $11,500 for like

15:27

a single book,

15:30

which is pretty awesome. Yeah. Wow. You

15:32

know, honestly, I think it's really just, we're trying to get

15:34

momentum and get it, get it going and get

15:36

it started. Like we're, you know, the base is growing.

15:38

And I think as we expanded these more chains and

15:40

we've got some bigger kind of partnerships with some

15:43

larger authors and publishers

15:45

coming up that it's going to be super exciting.

15:47

So somebody can go to the site,

15:50

they connect their wallet, They can buy with

15:52

an ethe, or matic, or kurdano,

15:54

depending upon the book. And then

15:57

is this your own e-reader dapp

15:59

that you've created?

16:00

or can people read these on,

16:03

you know, other Kindle or other methods? Like

16:05

how do you make this convenient for people to consume?

16:09

So we do have an e-reader, the DAPT, it's

16:11

an HTML 5 reader that you can read on the

16:13

site here. And then we

16:16

also released an Android reading app and

16:18

an iOS reading app. And sort

16:20

of, you know, the goal, you know, there's kind of this fundamental

16:22

difference right between like a centralized retailer,

16:24

right? Like a Kindle. They

16:27

work in a much more walled off way. So

16:29

they're not sharing a lot of data with an

16:32

author or publisher, it's very much, they

16:34

see it as their user. And then they're cutting

16:36

a check to, as you guys probably know, when you're selling

16:39

books on Amazon, you don't have direct access

16:41

to your reading base, right? So

16:43

in our instance, wanting to effectively

16:46

decentralized that model so creators

16:48

have access to their direct access to their

16:51

audience. We can do a lot

16:53

of different things there. So an

16:56

Amazon or an iBooks isn't really going to be inclined

16:58

to want to necessarily

17:01

work with us. However, we're building some SDKs

17:03

out that will actually launch from different wallets. So

17:06

you could launch it and read it from, uh, from

17:08

any other wallet or any other reader, right? There's some other smaller

17:11

e-readers out there. We're talking to some device

17:13

manufacturers as well, which is super exciting.

17:17

So it sounds to me like it's, there's the

17:19

potential for just a complete

17:21

reimagining of books.

17:23

One of the things that I thought about before Joshua

17:27

was I think I thought about like five, six years ago

17:29

around when VR becomes

17:32

more prevalent or when AR becomes more

17:34

prevalent, like to have those goggles on while

17:36

you're reading a physical book, it could

17:38

literally say using computer

17:41

vision, know which book you're reading

17:43

or see the words that you're reading and then read

17:45

it to you like in Morgan

17:47

Freeman's voice or something. That's

17:49

kind of one of the things that I was thinking about for

17:51

even new books is like,

17:53

one, here's how I like here's how I most

17:56

love to consume books. I like to have

17:58

a book in front of me normally a paper

18:00

version. While I'm listening to an audio

18:02

book version of that on Kindle,

18:04

it's called whisper sync. But with AI

18:07

being so amazing. Now you can almost

18:09

build AI into your reader platform

18:12

and have it read it to you and whatever voice

18:14

you want it read to you it. Yeah,

18:16

exactly right. We were experimenting

18:18

with some AI voice stuff

18:21

with a couple different partner companies. You

18:24

can have your own voice read your book to you. Like,

18:27

like That would be an insane

18:29

sort of meta.

18:31

What? Yeah,

18:32

yeah, I really would. There's in

18:34

it. The sample sets really small, too.

18:37

It's crazy. It's like 82 words or something, I

18:39

think you say. And then they can reproduce your

18:41

entire vocabulary. It's

18:43

wild.

18:44

I want to have my book read to me in

18:46

the voice of a sexy French maid. And

18:49

now we'll read to you Twitter power. My

18:52

name is Francine Bonjour.

18:54

That's

18:54

is that a thing? Because that's a very good

18:57

idea, Jocone. I do not. So these

18:59

are my books right here. I went into

19:01

my library and I've got the art of

19:03

war and the Wizard of Oz. I got

19:05

mint number 119 of the Art of War and Wizard

19:07

of Oz number 430. And I could

19:10

send this book to somebody else. I go, I'm

19:12

done with this. I've got I've got my war

19:14

and my art done. Sun Tzu nailed it. And

19:16

here you go, Travis. I can send it to your wallet or

19:18

I can read it. Same thing with the Wizard of Oz.

19:20

And when I click read my wallet

19:23

is connected. I've already validated

19:25

that I own the book by connecting my

19:27

ledger. And now I can go into

19:30

here and I can read the book

19:33

all about Dorothy and Toto and Twisters

19:36

and

19:38

Wicked Witches. I love that. So forth.

19:41

So, Josh, what about this? What about this? What about this? Yeah,

19:43

this is good. What about this? Can, is there a way

19:45

to sort of, you know, include,

19:47

so because this, this kind of takes the,

19:50

you know, the print model, right? Gutenberg,

19:53

I'm putting I'm putting ink to paper,

19:55

right? You You don't have to do that digitally.

19:58

Can we now can we constrain? truck

20:00

books in a new way that we can add,

20:02

you know, a creative, colorful images

20:05

in the book, um, you know, sort

20:07

of emojis, all kinds of those things.

20:10

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, our first book

20:12

that we released last year, the very first one,

20:15

we actually did like the, the 1456 version

20:19

of the Gutenberg Bible in Latin, like the original

20:22

OG very first printed

20:24

book, kind of just as an homage to, to the,

20:27

know, the revolutionary step and knowledge

20:30

dissemination. And so within that

20:32

book, it was a really good challenge, because it's about

20:34

eight times the size of a normal book, just the raw

20:37

like textual size. But then we inserted

20:39

high resolution photos

20:43

of the original throughout it. And then we actually put a

20:45

video in it as well.

20:47

And all of it's completely decentralized, you

20:49

can only see, you know, and go through

20:51

it if you actually own it.

20:53

And then when you're done, Joel, you can send

20:55

it to someone else. Right. That's

20:57

like I read the book rather, you know, because they got

20:59

like, you know, where I was in Denver and I know many

21:02

places around the world, they have these, they have this little

21:04

book house and people would take

21:06

their books and they'd put them in there and, you

21:08

know, leave them for others to come buy and get, or

21:10

they'd sell them on eBay or at the flea market or

21:12

whatever. And, you know, these book clubs pass

21:14

them around and this is like one

21:16

central marketplace. Now there's something

21:19

here that I want to point out that is a really big

21:21

deal. Many people know

21:23

publishers by their name, Penguin Random

21:26

House and So on, you might not

21:27

know what Ingram is. Ingram

21:31

is the biggest distributor

21:33

of books, like a lot of the

21:35

books Amazon gets, they get from

21:38

Ingram. And you guys did

21:41

a deal with them. They have actually invested.

21:43

Ingram is invested

21:45

with Book.io. Talk

21:47

about how

21:48

important that is. Yeah,

21:51

I mean, from the industry perspective, it's it's

21:53

huge, right? They are the

21:55

biggest book distributor in the world. have operations literally,

21:58

I mean everywhere. Um,

22:00

they were the most part, if you buy a physical

22:03

book, most people don't know this, but like, if you buy a physical book,

22:05

like most of the time, uh, that

22:07

book doesn't exist until you hit

22:09

the order button on Amazon. And

22:12

with it, you know, their SLA with, with

22:14

Amazon is super tight. So within, uh, you

22:17

know, 48 hours, right before that book shows

22:19

up for two days shipping, they receive your

22:21

order. They print that book, they print the cover,

22:23

they bind it, pack it, ship it and get it to you.

22:26

And so they are, you know, by far and away, like the

22:28

biggest name in all

22:31

of publishing on the print side. And so

22:34

they had actually invested in a

22:36

prior company that we had done in the publishing industry

22:38

and sold that company. And I'm very

22:40

interested in just like the infrastructure of like what we're

22:42

doing using blockchain to power digital.

22:46

And yeah, they have kind of

22:48

a funny story that the

22:50

CEO there, he had the opportunity to take

22:52

a 30% share of Amazon at

22:54

one point early on, early on, Jeff

22:57

Bezels had come to him and offered him 30%, but

23:00

he wasn't sure if it would work. So he didn't

23:03

invest, but he did fulfill access

23:06

to books, which is what Amazon

23:08

started with, of course. So yeah,

23:10

they're a huge name. And then we have another

23:12

one as well. We were pretty strategic in who we wanted

23:15

to invest. The other one is Bertelsman,

23:18

their digital media investments group, which

23:21

they own. It's

23:23

a massive media conglomerate. Yeah, they

23:25

own BMG and part of Sony, and then they own

23:27

all of Penguin Random House on the publishing side.

23:29

Yep.

23:32

I love this, Joel.

23:34

I mean, it's one of those things. It's like having both

23:37

of us be authors, you more authory

23:40

than most, and then taking

23:42

that type of taking that and then being

23:44

able. It seems to me that this is

23:46

a way Joshua to sort of wrap community

23:49

into the book experience, especially

23:52

if you're offering it as a cereal.

23:57

100% 100% because we can do a lot of really cool stuff

23:59

like we do we do

24:00

some different things to

24:02

discord right now, but we're building out sort of a

24:04

social side. So if you have

24:06

those books, because then we can do really cool stuff to

24:08

where we verify if you've actually read it, right.

24:10

So maybe to be in a particular group, right,

24:12

if you think about it in sort of a discord sense, right, you

24:15

would not only would have to own those books, but we

24:17

would have to verify that you've actually read them, and then

24:19

you get access. So then you get really qualified,

24:21

you're talking to really qualified, super

24:23

fans, right? We're talking to people

24:25

who actually truly love

24:28

you. And then what's interesting

24:30

is that you can do so many things

24:32

on the fly with these. It's,

24:35

it's just, my mind's going a million miles an hour,

24:37

Joel.

24:38

Yeah. There's so much. And I'm looking through on

24:40

open sea, some of these book covers. I don't know

24:43

if you saw the one I was just showing there, this cowardly lion

24:45

that just looks like he's

24:47

bad-ass. Are those all mid journey

24:49

created?

24:50

So they, uh, there's, there's a different,

24:53

come a couple of different combinations of software.

24:55

Um, And some of it that they've written in

24:57

Python to overlay. So

24:59

we've kind of created some of our own modules too, to

25:01

do some of this. Look how cool that

25:03

is with the Twister taking out the Kansas

25:06

farm home. Well, this is fantastic.

25:09

You guys can go check this out, go to book.io

25:13

and poke around there. I say, go grab

25:15

a book. You can get a book here

25:17

for a couple matic. That's like a couple

25:20

dollars and

25:20

try to- I got one last question, Joel. I was

25:23

just thinking about it. And I was rambling

25:25

with my last question because I forgot this question.

25:27

So can we have books Joshua

25:30

that are maybe we're going to sell it, but it's unlimited

25:33

amounts of them. It's like I want

25:35

to take this book and I don't care how many people

25:37

buy this first chapter. I want you

25:39

get access to it. Then you're able to then

25:41

you're able to do additional stuff because you have

25:43

access but the whole book

25:46

could be its own. There could be a minimal amount or

25:48

a maximum amount of those or there's other NFT

25:50

properties,

25:50

but I want as

25:53

many people who wants to get one of

25:55

these as possible. Is there a way to

25:57

sort of do an unlimited mint? Yeah, definitely.

25:59

Definitely.

26:00

we've actually done one meant that

26:02

we did was basically almost like fungible,

26:04

right? So it was, there was no difference

26:06

between the books. They weren't numbered. There was nothing different between

26:09

them. Um, and that, that you can time

26:11

box to like, you could make it available for a certain

26:13

amount of time where it could just be like, you know, non-ending

26:16

and uh, yeah, you can do all kinds of crazy different

26:18

ways that, that have not been possible

26:20

through, uh, through the traditional mechanisms.

26:24

Love this.

26:25

Joel, this is good stuff. Hi brother. It's just getting

26:27

started too. So I So really encourage you guys to go

26:30

over to book IO and check this out. Josh,

26:32

is there anything else you would like to share

26:34

with the Republic of bad Cryptopia?

26:37

Um, let's see. Yeah. I

26:39

mean, just excited to be on here. I think, you know, we've got some really

26:42

exciting stuff coming up, doing a big thing at consensus

26:45

with this new blockchain. Um, uh,

26:47

let's see next month too. In May, we're going

26:49

to drop a one of Mark Cuban's

26:51

books. He was actually one of our earliest seed

26:54

investors and super

26:56

excited about that. And then on the music

26:58

side too, because we've developed out audio

27:00

book capabilities because audio books are growing.

27:03

And really there's no difference between an audio book and

27:06

an album, right? It's just a set of tracks

27:08

with music. So we're starting to work

27:10

with a few different artists and

27:12

collaborate on how we're going to produce, you

27:15

know, basically almost like going back to CDs, right?

27:17

Where like you have to own this album in

27:19

order to listen to it.

27:20

It's true. It's decentralized

27:23

DRM. Yep, exactly. Yeah,

27:25

exactly. So DDRM

27:27

would be the thing. I might still do

27:29

that. That's good. So when this, uh, when this

27:32

show runs, we're going to be at NFT

27:34

NYC. Are we going to see you?

27:37

Are we seeing you now there in New York? Yeah,

27:39

we've talked about going up there. So you know, what's

27:41

funny is we're, um, we're kind of torn between,

27:44

we do a lot of book stuff too, right? So I'll be

27:46

in London, um, and a couple of weeks, uh, at

27:48

the London book fair. So we kind of go back and forth

27:50

between crypto related stuff and book

27:52

related stuff. So we're always like juggling like exactly

27:55

what to do.

27:56

Tying the world together. Well, Josh, appreciate you coming

27:58

on. Thank you so much. And we

28:01

appreciate you guys out there in the Republic.

28:03

Check out the site. And of course, as always,

28:05

we like your reviews. We'd love your feedback.

28:07

Bag Crypto Podcast at gmail.com

28:11

is where to find us. And Josh, we're going to bestow

28:13

on you a very unique honor that

28:16

only a handful of people get

28:18

to do, but you get to close us out

28:20

and tell people what they need. Thank

28:23

you guys. I appreciate your time. Stay Bad

28:45

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