Canonic.xyz and literary experiments with NFT's

What happened in 2021 and will it ever happen again?

The Canonic.xyz home page.

Disclosure: I currently have no commercial relationship with the founders at Canonic.xyz, although I am looking into getting my novel published on their platform. I don’t own any stake in their business nor do I own any literary NFT’s. this is not investment advice and you should do your own research before buying anything, which I don’t recommend that you do.

Canonic is a crypto publishing platform that launched several years ago. Users can be purchase physical books and collectible literary NFT’s using crypto. By allowing users to pay with crypto, Canonic circumvents an increasingly important censorship chokepoint in the modern economy: the credit card payment processor (Substack, in comparison, does not do this, allowing it to outsource part of its censorship and moderation role to Stripe as an arms-length third party).

Literary NFT’s that you can purchase on their site.

From Canonic’s FAQ page, we can learn more about the basics of their platform:

Content published with Canonic is directly stored on BTC Ordinals and on the BitcoinSV chain.

This allows you to reach your audience with a global and stable censorship resistant Proof of Work network, earn income with Bitcoin, and build on top of an interoperable and decentralized layer.

In the age where AI algorithms have the power to tamper with data at scale, Bitcoin allows you to cryptographically prove the existence of a piece of work at a particular moment in time.

Canonic stores the following parts of your work online:

BTC Chain Ordinals:

1. An image of your work's cover so you can prove authorship with your wallet keys

2. The hash of your work so you can protect it from future tampering

BSV Chain:

1. Your encrypted work so you can prove authorship with your wallet keys

2. An on chain unique identifier of your work we call the BSBN (Bitcoin Standard Book Number)

3. Title, author, description, cover, and price of the book

4. The paymail of the entity that published the work

5. Reviews from users who can prove on chain their book purchase

6. User's encrypted purchase receipts

In summary, we can think of a platform like this as circumventing two forms of censorship:

1. Prospective censorship prior to your work being published (evading the Amazon or large publishing platform chokepoint).

2. Retroactive censorship after your work has already been published (for an example, we can look to Roald Dahl’s books being modified many years after his death).

I’m particularly interested in Canonic because of one thing in particular: to my knowledge, they hosted the most successful literary NFT sale of all time.

Sometime around the height of the 2021 crypto bubble (I can’t seem to find or remember the exact date), pseudonymous science fiction author and essayist

Zero HP Lovecraft

(ZHP) released a short story collection in NFT form on Canonic.xyz.

Each on-chain NFT that was sold was redeemable for a premium leather-bound book and the collection sold out rapidly to the tune of 50 thousand dollars. Even accounting for the bubble-driven financial mania of the era, this was a fairly remarkable commercial achievement for a pseudonymous author with no institutional backing of any kind.

I followed this with great interest because at the peak of this financial euphoria, it seemed like a new publishing model had suddenly been unlocked.

Around this time, Emily Segal did a crowdfund for her next novel on Mirror.xyz for a similar sum in ETH, which also felt very exciting.

If only I had this kind of marketing prowess, lol

To put this moment of hope into context, it seems like publishers are increasingly adherent to something like a Hollywood-style publishing model: putting the great majority of their marketing resources behind huge anticipated blockbusters, and a small minority of resources behind discovering the next breakout success. Authors in the middle of these two extremes—the mid-list—have been increasingly struggling to make a living.

And of course, it’s the mid-list where most literary fiction authors might hope to have a dream of writing full-time—an increasingly impossible endeavor. This dynamic of an extreme power law distribution in success seems to be a general trend for all artistic fields due to attention-distribution dynamics on the internet.

Literary NFT platforms were, in my view, an attempt to overcome the ruthless power law economics of modern publishing, where the mid-list author gets obliterated and you either get scraps or a home-run style movie deal. If the medium-sized fan base of a midlist author is interested in crypto-collectible versions of their favorite literary works, then this might open up a new lifeline of support for the kind of modest life of the arts that writers like myself aspire to have. This was something of an extension of the “1000 true fans” hypothesis.

Most of us, of course, have always struggled to negotiate this balance between writing literary fiction and making a living. Speaking for myelf, I’ve found it exhausting to work full-time and then to write after work or on weekends, and I’ve often taken extended breaks from writing simply because the imperatives of needing to eat and pay rent were so overriding. Energy has been a major constraint for me in this respect, and to an extent I’m still feeling a bit burnt out after the intensive leadup into writing and self-publishing my debut under a year ago, which I did while effectively unemployed.

This is not to complain or to expect that a life of the arts should be economically viable as your sole source of income, but merely to point out that’s difficult, and the promise of the literary NFT once held great hope for me as a writer of fiction. I don’t ever want to make money on a newsletter since my newsletter is itself a means of acquiring readers for my novel and connecting with a community of readers and writers more generally, but I understand completely how vital it’s become to many authors of both fiction and non-fiction (and I am indeed very happy to see this, it’s just not a strategy that maps onto my own goals).

Thus, it was with some degree of disappointment that the NFT bubble popped and effectively nuked most of its markets, including the literary ones.

If we look at the transaction history for one of ZHP’s literary NFT’s on Canonic, we see the aftershock of what happened post FTX-collapse by virtue of the lack of transaction history:

If we are being honest, it does seem like NFT’s in general were mostly a ZIRP-driven casino, and the NFT market hasn’t recovered even as BTC has pumped back to all-time-highs. I do think that one can speculate that proof-of-scarcity may once again return if and when AR and/or VR approximate photorealistic fidelity, in which case 3-dimensional objects in AR or VR might once again be valuable insofar as their ownership and uniqueness can be proven on-chain, but that’s still guessing.

A cursory survey of various crypto publishing platforms I’ve kept track of reveals that the market for literary NFT’s never really got started.

Mirror.xyz - raised a Series A, very likely never made any profit, and recently got bought out by Paragraph.xyz (some kind of crypto version of Substack?). Dead platform.

Bookcoin.com - had the backing of some big names like Mark Manson and Neil Strauss, but from what I can see, they only ever sold images of text on OpenSea which I once heard Manson describe as a “fractionalized book” (LOL - I still like the guy, though). Dead platform.

Soltype launched on Solana (I think they were bootstrapped?). Seems like they have a couple of real books but the covers look like AI spam. Dead platform.

AlexandriaLabs.xyz - launched quite some time ago but only have a couple of books for sale on their website. Dead platform.

There was a time where I had hoped that I might work on a project like this (which was a total fantasy, as I’m not a technical person), but the market showed that at least this current iteration of literary NFT’s isn’t even close to generating sustainable demand from collectors.

This is probably because people who like to read book are almost always not the type of person to gamble on JPEG’s (or, in this case, PDF’s).

I still believe in the idea of digital collectible books, but I think we won’t see them garner any demand until people are spending most of their days in AR or VR environments where proof-of-ownership feels more realized due to the dimensionality of a “digital book” in such an environment.

To see a really cool in-browser mockup of what a 3-D book could look like, check out Stripe.press:

You can rotate the book around with your mouse.

One of the coolest website on the intenet!

Regardless of the literary NFT component, general crypto publishing platforms like Canonic are still vitally important in the age of the monopolistic platform fiefdom—a state of affairs which is nothing short of feudalism—and I think every writer interested in freedom of expression should make an effort to put their books on platforms like this in order to contribute to their growth over time.

Regardless of your political affiliation, building a lifeboat off of AMAZORG is a collective-action problem that we are ultimately all heavily incented to solve.