Nifty Books

When you purchase an ebook from a web store like Amazon, you don’t own the book. Since you don’t own it, you’re not allowed to resell it or send it as a gift when you’re finished reading.Companies like Amazon prevent reselling and gifting of ebooks because secondary ebook markets could lower the market prices for ebooks and earn publishers and authors less money.

Nifty Books allows authors to self-publish and turn their ebooks into NFTs. Authors sell their ebooks to readers and earn royalties from the receiver anytime the NFT is resold or transferred. Consumers who purchase ebook NFTs will own them and can view them using a web reader and pulling files from IFPS. Using your ETH wallet, you can resell ebooks on Rarible or OpenSea, or you can gift the book to someone with a few simple token transfers (to cover the royalty). An author earns a royalty fee each time the book is resold and transferred. Royalty revenues will prevent a decline and even increase total revenues for authors whose ebooks are being traded in a secondary market.

Since every NFT pays to the same trust wallet, storage costs are socialized among all NFT books, preventing any particular book from decaying because someone holds on to a book.

This project uses a smart contract developed using solidity. We utilize the ERC721 standard and SuperFluid libraries to build our methods that enable authors to mint their ebook NFTs, sell their NFT, and receive royalties on each transfer. We chose the Superfluid SuperToken as the payment method for royalties and storage fees because this library makes it easier to stream payments back to the author and storage contract. We will use Filecoin to measure prices and determine storage fees. Polygon is used to deploy the app to the test net.

This was an exploration for Rashi in to building ethereum contracts, and exploring complex interactions between contracts and wallets. By subclassing Superfluids example on remix, and heavily modifying their code to allow access to the underlying superTokens and creating an automatic royalty that pays for the nft, we created a new way to use NFTs and pay for them.

A trust wallet that every nft book deposits in to holds the storage fees and streams using Superfluid to a storage provider wallet that is chosen by the author. Eventually Filecoin will be the one determining where the file is stored. Groups of books can be bundled in an index using NFTX and each ERC20 token issued can be sold as a library membership. Owners of the ERC20 tokens could read any ERC721 ebook NFT in the NFTX index. These tokens can be listed on UniSwap and give authors exposure to the demand on these liquidity markets.