The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt '"RSTORY" is the future of digital publishing.'
Printed newspapers, magazines, and books no longer dominate the media landscape. Most publishing these days is digital. The economics of paper-based publishing don't really work online. Revenue models based on advertising or subscription fees both fall flat in different ways.
While advertisements in printed newspapers and magazines can be annoying, they're also static. They don't move around or flash annoyingly or get in the way of the content we're trying to look at. Online ads, on the other hand, are literally malware that burns our computing power while helping shadowy data brokers track our every move.
Subscription models online are also used to collect our data, making it easy for the powers that be to know exactly who is paying attention to exactly what piece of news. This level of surveillance naturally facilitates repression. On a more practical level, the cognitive overhead of keeping track of login credentials and automatic billing schedules is substantial. Maintaining more than a couple of media subscriptions is costly and confusing. When every paper charges $10/month, consuming a diverse and balanced media diet quickly becomes outrageously expensive.
The media organization I work for uses a nonprofit model. Everything we offer is available for free and readers donate to keep the operation afloat. I'd love to see more news outlets move to this model, but realistically it's very hard to convince readers to donate and keep donating. And there are many kinds of media products that are a poor fit for the donation model.
I'm always exploring alternatives to these models with my imprint No Shirt Press. So far I've published 8 scifi novels under this imprint, though only 7 are for sale because I made Small Gods of Time Travel available for free as part of an NFT project. While some of my readers buy paper books, many prefer the digital experience. With 7 ebook titles on Amazon at an average list price of $5, it costs about $35 to purchase all of these books.
Crypto Connection
A few years back I created a crypto token called Rstory. My plan was to use the token for virtual philanthropy but there was little interest in that at the time. I gave away 2m tokens on ETH but haven't touched the EOS tokens I minted. I've been afraid to sell them because doing so could theoretically have run afoul of securities regulations.
Recently, I decided to revive Rstory, and to give it clear underlying value to keep me on the right side of the Howie test. The idea is to make it so anyone with one of my tokens in their wallet can access any of my scifi novels for free. The mechanism for this is mostly in place. Getting my website to connect with Anchor wallet is the only thing left to do, and I hope to have that done in the next couple of weeks.
In a sense, buying an Rstory token will be akin to buying a transferable lifetime subscription to my ebooks and any other media products I choose to make available in this way in the future. I plan to sell the tokens for 1 EOS each initially, providing good value for the money. In the future, there may be products that can only be accessed by someone who possesses a larger number of Rstory tokens.
It would also be possible for other publishers to buy Rstory at a discount from me, sell the tokens to their readers for a profit, then offer their products to token holders. A whole ecosystem of media could even develop, with readers able to enjoy all sorts of things after securing just one extremely affordable crypto token. Of course, other publishers could make their own tokens, but making a custom EOS token isn't as easy as you might think.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.