How Does an NFT Book Marketplace Work?

Every other day a new NFT marketplace comes out, and it seems like things won’t be changing for quite a while in the NFT space.

Given how NFTs have increased from an $82.5 million market in 2020 to a $17 billion market in 2021, it’s no surprise that every major player in the crypto world wants to invest in NFTs.

However, what about book NFTs?

If OpenSea won’t allow PDFs or ePubs for minting, how can a writer mint their work as an NFT?

To learn more about how an NFT book marketplace could work, I interviewed the team behind Readl, a unique NFT storytelling platform currently in the making.

Here’s what I learned from interviewing the first NFT book marketplace:

What is an NFT?

An NFT is a non-fungible token, a digital asset with foundations on tamper-free blockchain technology.

Traditionally, NFTs have been reserved for visual media, video games, and audio files, such as songs. As time passed, NFTs have been used for digital memberships and marketing using airdrops.

Books have been the only media type not to enjoy the mainstream coverage of NFTs. Readl seeks to change this with their NFT book marketplace.

What is Readl?

More than an NFT book marketplace, Readl is better understood as a Web3 storytelling platform. This means that they allow the minting of NFTs as books and additional collaboration features between content creators, readers, and writers.

What does Readl do?

Readl provides you with the option to mint both books and collectibles. As of their latest update, you can upload ePub files.

An NFT book collection is created when you mint a book and add other media files as extras, such as audio, illustrations, video, and animations. Essentially, this is the bundling feature made live in an NFT marketplace.

Readers can also experience cross-media NFTs while reading to create a never-seen-before immersive experience.

To make it easier to grasp, imagine reading a shocking scene in a horror book while ominous, original soundtracks recorded as audio NFTs play in the background out of a sudden. Minting NFTs and bundling files are just a tiny snippet of the things Readl can do for authors.

Their first collection was the Genesis Collection, collaborating with ten emerging artists that illustrated ten classic novels. We’re talking about the NFT book version of Dracula, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, and others that came with the NFT book themselves, plus exclusive NFT illustrations you could purchase and resell using crypto.

They are currently whitelisting authors and publishers to promote their stories through Readl. Their main marketing methods are Discord and Twitter, collaborating with authors and artists to sow the seeds for NFT books on Web3.

How Does Readl Work?

Readl is a publishing platform. Their platform is like an OpenSea, but specifically for NFT books.

You can upload an ePub file including the book cover, title, description, author name, ISBN (optional), and the language of the book.

There’s an option for copyright ownership, where you can clarify who the work belongs to if it’s a public domain work.

After the ePub file is uploaded, it will present you with a preview of your book content. As NFTs cannot be modified after minted, taking a thorough look at the book preview is vital before continuing.

Once you ensure it’s ready, you click continue, mint, and publish. You can decide the number of copies the book will have and the commission on the resale. Readl will create a copyright contract automatically.

It will then prompt up your crypto wallet, and then you can fulfill the payment using Moonriver.

The platform shows as a standard ePub file does on Readl. You can customize the way to read the book, the theme, color, and fonts. The team shared the fonts with the Discord so members could vote on which ones they desired to see on the live version of Readl.

How does Readl benefit NFT artists?

Readl is pioneering the evolution of storytelling. Books in web2 work in a one-directional communicative street, where the writer speaks to the reader through the text. The reader cannot communicate with the writer other than by leaving reviews on intermediary book marketplaces such as Amazon.

Web2 has too many barriers for writers who want to reach their readers. The fees they’d avoid from Amazon or a traditional book publisher, they’d instead spend rewarding the NFT book readers.

Readl revolutionizes reader-author interactions with their platform. Story fans now have a say on how their favorite author’s stories can evolve on Web3. Authors can reward participation. Whether a reviewer, a cosplayer, or a YouTuber, the author can directly interact with you in real-time.

Some of the unique features Readl will implement include:

• Cross-media digital assets can be bundled with the NFT book.
• Authors can put up a bounty pool for fans and readers who produce content based on their IP, such as fanfiction.
• Up to 98% royalties for each NFT book sale and up to 20% for each NFT resale.
• You can release limited editions exclusively on Readl, helping your stories acquire extra value in the market.
• Their platform will provide readers and fans the opportunity to fund their favorite stories and get rewarded for them, proposing a crowdfunding 2.0 for authors. Through this method, readers can purchase royalties and support the authors.
• Authors can create subcommunities for their readers, allowing them to participate in decisions about their books. They can also directly interact with the author and their work.

For example, if you were reading a book and a particular scene meant something to you, you’ll be able to comment on that through Readl’s platform and share it with your author’s subcommunity. That’s what Readl wants to create: a community of readers that can interact with the author and their work in real-time.

These subcommunities are known as Universes. Here’s an example from Readl’s website:

On a more practical level, Readl provides writers with a way to engage readers. And where there are engaged readers, there will be active writers. For both writers and readers, it’s a brand new creative experience.

What is Moonriver crypto?

Readl uses Moonriver (MOVR) as its cryptocurrency of choice. Moonriver is a parachain companion to Moonbeam on the Polkadot system. Polkadot works by uniting many heterogeneous blockchains. Here’s a more detailed guide on how Moonriver works and how you can buy it yourself.

You can check Moonriver’s price on CoinGecko. As of writing, 1 MOVR costs $27.78. Considering how MOVR is a cryptocurrency, its price could skyrocket depending on volatility.

Moonriver is compatible with most of the wallets compatible with Ethereum. You can purchase Moonriver with fiat currency in most mainstream crypto exchanges: Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin, and others.

If you have Metamask, you can use it to purchase Moonriver crypto. Readl’s team chose the Polkadot ecosystem thanks to its EVM compatibility and Moonriver’s low fees for minting. Through Moonriver, writers can mint hundreds of books while keeping the costs down.

Readl’s team has expressed cross-blockchain compatibility in the future, but Moonriver is their blockchain of choice for now. They mentioned possible migration to Polygon, Ethereum, and later on Avalanche.

They are also developing a way for fiat payment channels that allow NFT book buyers to purchase the book directly.

How did Readl come to be?

The idea came to Diego, Readl’s CEO. A few years ago, Diego had experienced first-hand how readers never actually own digital books.

He wanted to read The Hobbit with his son in its Catalan edition, which he purchased on Amazon Kindle. It turns out that the contract between Amazon and the Catalan Hobbit publisher had recently ended, and the book disappeared from his Kindle. Despite “owning” the book, he didn’t have access to it anymore.

And that’s how Readl idea was born: their team wants to leverage Blockchain technology to let readers like Diego and his son own digital books for the first time.

Readl’s community is active on Discord and constantly provides its NFT project members with updates on the marketplace’s functionality, fulfilled milestones on the roadmap, and live calls where you can meet their staff and ask them questions about the project.

Giulia from Readl’s team expressed their biggest challenge: NFT books are still uncharted territory. Readl is the first-of-its-kind pioneer of crypto books. Educating aspiring writers and their target audience is another roadblock.

Among Readl’s goals, they want to bring the more traditional user to the platform. They wish to approximate themselves with industry standards and allow writers to understand better how to publish.

The Bottom Line

Readl is the digital bridge between writers and the cryptocurrency space. A platform that serves as the OpenSea of book NFTs is a big step in the right direction for authors to start earning from NFTs.

Their Genesis Collection is already sold out, a testament that readers are, in fact, interested in NFT books. If you want to learn more about Readl, their Discord is open for writers interested in joining the whitelist.

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