Books

You've probably already heard that today Amazon is pulling the right to download ebooks. This makes it abundantly clear what has always been true: people don't own digital media on web2, and that's a problem.

At Alexandria, we debuted ebook download today with our latest release, a collection of thrillers.

Founder, CEO, and Muse of Tragedy of /alexandria

founder of lbry.com here. i understand completely 🫡

I'm sharing this because Farcaster users actually understand what it means to own digital media with web3 (and soon everyone will understand!)

Founder of /fcny - 50+ IRL events for Farcaster's builder ecosystem | Systems + community strategy

Alexandria Labs (alexandriabooks.com) builds infrastructure for ownable e-books and audiobooks! That's right, it's up to the author (and/or the publisher, if there is one involved) whether their readers can download ebooks. However, every collection on our platform is truly owned by readers, whether they can download or not!

Hi! What is Alexandria? Does the author need to consent to allow their books to be ebook downloaded?

Visual • Coffee stains • Product Designer • Founder @operatingsystem • Fixing /cars

You can download it as an EPUB file, so then you can read it with any app, including offline! It's up to the author and their goals whether to use this feature.

How does it work offline? I assume you can download it but can’t bring it out of the app?

So far though, we've found that collectors of Alexandria books are buying their books to keep, not to read and resell, even with the much lower priced collections. In this way, collectors of NFT ebooks are behaving more like collectors of physical books (which are still a thriving luxury product).

This is why digital media NFTs can have non-speculative utility. You're absolutely right, if people are just collecting it for entertainment, they can then resell it immediately. This creates a great opportunity for a secondhand ebook economy. There's already a healthy secondhand *physical* book economy, but now authors and publishers can participate in the digital one via creator fees.

Still, by reselling, people won't still own the NFT. So these ebook NFTs  have collector value separate from reading. It's up to the consumer, how they'd like to treat their book. If they want to read it and then resell at a loss, and treat that loss as a worthy price they paid for the entertainment, they sure can. If they want to keep it in their collection, they can do that too.

Some Alexandria collections naturally lend themselves to one of these types of interaction. The Konrath Signature Edition, for example, is really intended for dedicated fans, because the handmade unique covers have inherent collector value.

Q about the vision for Alexandria: If people own digital media, does it mean they can resell it right after consuming? What stops a few "copies" from saturating the secondary market, bringing prices to near 0? (i.e., to the lowest $ value at which people would bother to resell)

That's why Ebert is here! You own the IP, you own the value

OMG been waiting for this for ages. It’s like librofm but for ebooks, it’s glorious!! So hyped