Joshua Stone is an exact DNA mixture of his parents. His father is an electronics engineer and his mother an artist. As a young child his father introduced him to a very elementary computer and instead of looking to use code to make things happen, he used the keyboard letters and symbols, and the five lines of text available in a DOS prompt, to try and make pictures – a first for ASCII art if you will.
His father would try and encourage him to explore circuit boards and other electronic stuff but while computers interested him, it was the graphics that held him captive. While in high school, he spent time exploring graphics but not as a means to design advertising ads, just the concept. As it happens, he entered Oklahoma State University where a new program called multimedia studies was launched during his first semester.
“I don’t think the professors really knew what they were doing but it was focused on the Internet and also CD ROMs which were new. I was instantly struck by the idea that not only might a musician’s album be stored on the CD ROM, but also extra videos or behind the scenes stuff.”
Stone’s mind is melded to be an entrepreneur. He likes to take on different roles, sometimes overlapping, and creativity is very important to him.
“What drives me is a combination of getting bored easily and also working in new tech that is ahead of the curve.”
He moved from various roles to focusing on the publishing world, co-founding Bookshout in 2009. This was the first end-to-end reading platform to be device agnostic. It quickly grew to millions of users with a catalogue of more than 2million titles, representing 186,000 publishers and imprints – including the big 5 publishers.
The team was moving fast but did not perhaps recognize the speed at which a giant like Amazon would react. The result was a huge copying of features that had not been tightly IP’d and which in the end destined the startup to fail.
He had encountered Bitcoin originally when the white paper came out and while it certainly piqued his curiosity about the nature of money, he did not regard it as something substantial in and of itself. Fast forward to 2013 and he began to see there might be something to it.
“I had a conversation with an engineer I knew and tried to persuade him to mine bitcoin but he argued it was too dark web. A few years later I approached him again but he felt it was too energy costly. To be honest, I should have learnt UNIX and done it myself – I knew at that stage both the technology and Bitcoin was very significant”
It was not until 2018 and that bull run that cemented his interest and which led him into a certainty that his future lay in this direction. The recent events covering ETFs and institutional money coming into cryptocurrency confirms his views.
Despite working in the publishing industry Stone would not call himself an author. He does read, mostly non-fiction, historic and business. He loves biographies. He is somewhat dyslexic which renders dialogue hard for him to read and so he steers away from fiction. He is also fascinated with classics, philosophy and political science, especially when it comes to the founding fathers and the US constitution.
He has also read many books on economics and money.
Setting up Book.io stemmed from his love of reading, the development of the BookShout platform, and emerging tech. He has worked with his co-founders on projects since 2000 and has gathered a strong leadership team around him with a total of 17 full time employees as well as some contractors.
“We know our roles well and we work very efficiently together which is super helpful.”
The genesis of Book.io traces back to the Frankfurt Book Fair where he launched BookShout. This was before GDPR and privacy laws but what struck him forcibly was that if he bought an e-book, that he should be able to read it on whatever device he chose. The big 5 publishers agreed but as mentioned Amazon was not so happy.
Stone began percolating ideas including how NFTs would address the issue of ownership across different devices. It was less an old-fashioned licensing model but a digital ownership model. The American businessman John Ingram had invested previously in BookShout and Stone went back to him for advice.
“We set up a call to talk about the future of publishing and somehow what I said made sense to him – despite it being very early in blockchain thinking. The basic idea was that if a book can live on chain, it becomes an actual digital object – a programmable book if you will – and that gives us lots of options including maximum transparency.
“None of that exists in traditional publishing as it is so opaque and authors sometimes have to hire firms to audit true sales. Anyway, John invested in us.”
Part of the issue handled by Stone and Book is the inherent change of state. A physical book turned into a digital book is a whole new thing. Consider how musician Taylor Swift remastered her back catalogue after fighting with her former record label. She created a new version, unencumbered with old IP or licensing claims.
“We are in lots of talks with publishers and they all have different interpretations. We think we have invented a new concept of actual digital book ownership. There is a huge spectrum of rights and specificity of what that means – even to the point that it is an entirely new right. It’s a bit fraught – for example, what if a publisher is only selling licensed ebook content, as opposed to actual digital ownership? There are many legal arguments happening here.”
For lawyers specializing in IP this is unchartered waters. Nothing much has changed in the world of traditional IP and Book.io is metaphorically rocking the boat.
In terms of technology, Book.io was launched on Cardano due to personal preferences of the leadership team. The introduction of Proof of Stake at Cardano was also important as Stone could not imagine a world where gas fees would be more expensive than the product. The negative issues around Proof of Work were also sensitive for book publishers already chastised for cutting down trees to print books.
At the end of the day, Book.io is blockchain agnostic. They may launch a book on Ordinals on Bitcoin, maybe a limited ultra collectible edition on Ethereum, and contrasting that with a popular book on Algorand which has tiny gas fees.
Book.io in numbers: It has minted 173 titles, sold 211,000 units (at time of writing – there is a live ticker on the site) and the total market cap is $21 million. In terms of revenue, it has surpassed $5 million with perhaps some $300,000 in secondary sales (from royalties).
A token was launched in October which is, in Stone’s words, doing quite well. In fact, they have launched a number of books that can only be bought using the token. While only two years in, Stone has a lot planned for the future.
As he points out, the digital book landscape is massive with more than a billion people reading digital books.
“But the crypto market is tiny with perhaps 100 million people owning crypto, if we can pair the two then there is a huge impetus to get people involved. And it’s not just books but anything with IP which includes music – an even bigger market than books.”
Interestingly the new name to cover this market is called ‘stuff.io’.
