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Applications of Blockchain In The Publication industry

Introduction

The publication industry is again an age-old industry that is struggling to find its place in the digital world. Like many industries, the industry has turned towards blockchain to figure out a solution for their woes. Many people are switching to digital for their reading purposes, say it books, newspapers, journals, or anything of that kind.

Hence the publishing industry’s revenue model, traditional distribution, is just not working anymore. Thus, many content creators are turning to digital, but with a lot of piracy and free content available digitally, it has proved robust to generate money. Using smart contracts to publish and make money using blockchain is one viable option.

Problems grappling the publication industry

When we say publishing, for a lot of people, only newspapers and books may come into mind. But publishing is not just tagged to these two, any content like software, videogames, apps, songs that can be created and shared for consumption can be said as publishing.

⚫ Intellectual Property & Copyright Management

This is the first and foremost problem the publication industry is currently facing. No one wants to publish anything without involving money. Once the content is out, anyone can make copies of it and distribute stuff for a lesser price than the original content. Blockchain can quickly solve this issue if the material is published in blockchain. If this technology can do one thing for sure, that is, its capability to store who owns the data.

⚫ Production

Once the work is completed, many people will be involved in publishing the work, like Publication company, editors, design, marketing, management, etc. These days anyone can print a book on their own if required, but high-quality books aimed at right people with proper marketing still need big publication houses. Instead of following the centralized way, if the content is published and shared using blockchains before making it to the market, many freelancers can gain if different works like design, editing, and stuff can be shared through the platform.

⚫ Revenue Generation

Digital copies will generate money based on the traffic to a particular blog or website. Ads will increase if the traffic is more. The content creators will be paid accordingly. But, in reality, we are relying on and trusting the third-party channel on the payments. This is not working out for most of the content creators. Blockchain solves this issue by generating views using transactions. Every view can make a transaction costing the consumer for the view. Even the consumers will be happy to pay the actual content creators instead of duplicate providers.

⚫ There’s More

Apart from general problems, let’s talk about education journals. Many academic researchers, Ph.D. students, professors of the best universities have to contribute their work on their field of study in the form of some papers. Only then, they can climb the ladder and earn some fame for their work. These papers are published in very high-priced journals, which in turn don’t pay anything for the job, but the authors agree to give away their work for absolutely nothing because that’s the only way to get published.

Blockchain can create a platform for these academicians and help them get paid. Orvium is such a platform founded by former CERN and NASA employees. Reviewers of the work may charge for their services using the platform, as peer review is a must for academic publications. In turn, academicians can charge for their work to be viewed by the general public or can choose to make it completely free.

There are many startups in the publishing industry on the blockchain. Publica is for book ICO’s. Many publishers depend on the publication houses for advances when they have to start a book, but this platform allows the users to pay in advance in the form of some tokens where they will get their copies once the work is completed.

Blockchain can be used in the publishing industry in different ways as per the above for much-needed respite for the industry.