In an age when paper books are not selling well, Hayakawa Shobo launched Hayakawa Shinsho in June. One of the hot topics is the release of a paper version that includes an “e-book with NFT.” One title of Hayakawa Shinsho has three versions: a paper version, a normal electronic version compatible with Amazon’s Kindle, and an “e-book with NFT”.

I wanted to know how it works, so I bought Toshiya Echizen’s “Reading in English with a Masterpiece Mystery” as an “E-book with NFT” from the first issue of the lineup.
All services will be provided through a platform called FanTop developed by Media Do, a major e-book wholesaler. FanTop’s dedicated app is required to read the books you bought, and this app will be a place to exchange tokens at the same time. Readers can freely price and sell e-books they have finished reading, and secondary distribution, which is equivalent to buying and selling old books in terms of paper books, is tracked using NFT technology, and the platform and the author distribute from the sales at the time of resale. can receive This platform distributes not only books but also various contents, and I found out that the book I bought, “Learn English Reading with Masterpiece Mysteries,” was the 1,202nd out of 1,750 items.
When I actually launched the FanTop app, I found that already published books were being sold at unexpectedly high prices, so I immediately put them up for sale. It is a system in which a “content usage fee” is added to the price set by the user, and the amount after subtracting the transaction fee is returned as points that are distributed only within FanTop. However, at present, Hayakawa Shinsho is the only publication distributed within the FanTop platform. Unless at least some other new books enter the market, “e-books with NFT”, which are enclosed by minor platforms, will remain at the stage of creating topics.

By the way, when it comes to Hayakawa Shinsho’s topical work, Shogo Shiozaki’s “Mystery of Sauce Yakisoba” was published in July. The contents full of color illustrations are also interesting, but the double cover that looks like a yakisoba pack container seems to be popular. However, such a gimmick is only possible for the paper version, and the e-book cover remains in a simple uniform binding. The e-book doesn’t do a good job of conveying how interesting it is. After all, the “materiality” of paper books has a great appeal.

According to Impress’s “E-book Business Research Report 2023”, last year’s e-book market was 602.6 billion yen. Comics continue to account for more than 80% of sales, while “text, etc.” (including photobooks) is only 60.1 billion yen. With Sao Ichikawa’s “Hunchback” winning the Akutagawa Prize, it is widely known that e-books can help reassess the “centered focus on the able-bodied” in reading and eliminate handicaps. From the September issue of the release, we decided to publish the electronic version. The launch of the “new book with NFT” is auspicious, but I think the publishing world has a lot of work to do before that.