The problem OpenShelf | OpenDesk solves

A NFT marketplace for e-Book. Here, Authors can self-publish books. Readers can buy or sell books while compensating the author on every exchange transaction.

Our Vision

We firmly believe that Internet has not just made information sharing smooth and easy but also has promoted people to self-learn from online resources. Among these resources, Wikipedia is a wellspring of information and YouTube is a quick-learn companion. But books not just provide information or short-time learnings but alleviate expertise and thus are more impactful overall.

Our Mission

To further promote self-learning, by making quality books accessible and cheap for all. Smartphones are an integral part of present human life and thus we want to leverage them for reading eBooks and saving trees by reducing paper books.

What we provide as of now?

Authors can self-publish books, even anonymously, having all freedom and no censorship over the content. It is easier to control market supply and the revenue from sales is directly sent into his/her wallet. Also, they receive 20% compensation for every exchange whenever it occurs. Books can also be distributed for free, whether to publicize or as a donation.

Readers can buy directly from Authors. As the books are being self-published, authors can earn better even by offering books at cheaper prices. They can sell books that are less likely to be read again in the future, and regain 80% of the original book cost. An inbuilt native ebook reader is provided and it is not required to use any other dedicated software. Readers can also rent books and can generate revenue in real time.

Upcoming Milestones :

• Author's dashboard and profile
• Searching and Filtering for Books & Authors
• Reades connect with Authors via inbuilt chat system

Challenges we ran into

Being newcomers to the web3 space, it took more time to get familiarized with all the technical stuff, especially with the smart contract development and integration with the frontend. Thanks to kickstart developer videos from youtube and related technical articles. Unknown errors occurred while using ganache or other tools. Since most of the things are in the development phase, we had to resolve errors by referencing the actual source code or searching for alternatives.

We've used ERC1155 token standard for eBook NFTs and added some "super" functionalities using Superfluid.
Our platform oferrs a renting functionality, where the rentee flows a stream to a renter(using Superfluid behind the scene). However, achieving it was not simple as the problem arised here is we needed to temporarily transfer the eBook access rights to the rentee. So we decided to create a super-app but now the issue was to create a direct flow between rentee and renter instead of first creating the flow to NFT contract and then the contract redirect the flow to the receiver (which we later discovered is the only way of doing it). Later, we rearchitected the smart contract and storage design. This is not fully accomplished as of now and is curently under development.