NFTs nonetheless have to mature to the purpose the place once you say NFT, folks don’t take into consideration frothy overpriced JPG photographs, however as an alternative a digital asset that represents one thing tangible. Writing might be not thrilling sufficient to offer that change, but it surely’s enjoyable to consider what might be completed, as I unpack under.
However one thing that has but to be popularised is NFTs for the phrases folks have written on a web page. Stephen King mentioned that writing is the purest type of artwork—you are attempting to seize ideas in your head and externalise them in prose earlier than they vanish again into the neural pathways from wherever they got here, doubtlessly gone eternally. This leads me to query why anybody isn’t already doing this.
Textual content within the written type may properly lend itself to NFTs of:
articles
poems
quick tales
novels
concepts
There’s already an extremely buoyant marketplace for first editions of books, so absolutely there are collectors who could be concerned about proudly owning the primary manuscript of books by well-established authors.
Much more powerfully, when somebody has what they imagine to be a breakthrough or modern concept, why not create an NFT of this thought on the web page? In some respects that is analogous to making a commerce mark or patent, however with out the necessity to work with a 3rd occasion. Somebody can merely seize their concept, create an NFT of it, after which forevermore show that they had been the primary particular person to seize the concept.
Nonetheless, my view is that we will go each larger and easier—we want an NFT format that helps any enter textual content file, it might be a small tweet-length piece, a brief story or perhaps a novel. Like how with the present crop of artwork NFTs, the asset in query is a picture file, for textual content, the asset in query must be a textual content file.
Entering into the specifics—how do you decide on a format for the supply textual content of those NFTs? If we wish to maintain as near the supply as attainable—the typewriter equal, and the supply work is simply phrases, I might argue that is Markdown.
The good factor about Markdown is that, not like plain textual content, it gives simply sufficient formatting to satisfy the wants of most writers—daring and italic emphasis, footnotes, headings, numbered and unnumbered lists.
So that is all good in concept, however art-based NFTs are visible and folks can present their possession, this doesn’t work with a textual content file. Moreover, what if they’ve photos, photographs or charts that should be represented? These are all legitimate concerns.
PDF is an open format that might be used, nonetheless, like with visible content material, a number of toolchains can be utilized to generate them, every producing a barely totally different digital doc. Whereas phrases in a markdown file might be thought of the data coming straight from the writer of their rawest type (luckily with out all the typos).
No matter which format is used, creating NFTs of this work might be thought of a type of mental property registration utilizing the blockchain. When somebody creates a brand new work in any format and generates an NFT of it, they’ve a method during which they will show they had been the unique particular person to register that IP, which for inventive people is a strategy to attribute concepts formally to themselves.
However we mustn’t lose sight of the truth that concepts are only one a part of the broader strategy of innovation, how folks select to execute these concepts is what turns them right into a actuality, however at the least you might be clear on the place they initially got here from.
