The problem OpenShelf | OpenDesk solves

A book isn’t just paper and binding. It is the words and ideas contained between the covers. The key difference between e-books and printed books is this lack of a physical object. As the most hyped and in-demand these days, NFTs for their ability to digitally represent the ownership proof of any good and get exchanged for real money, can be leveraged by authors for censorship-resistant authorship and by consumers for a reading experience, they never had before.

E-books are easier on the environment. Gone is the association with stinky paper mills and unnecessary tree slaughter. No glue, no expensive ink. Unlike paper books, e-books leave little to no carbon footprint. Leveraging NFTs for its digital record keeping can boost the usage of e-books.

OpenShelf makes it possible for readers to buy and store books on virtual shelves. These books can be read anytime. If a book is no longer needed for future reads, it can be sold to peer readers. If the book is a limited edition, its value may get increased due to scarcity. Last but not the least, these books can be taken or given on rent, therefore reading at very cheap rates and generating revenue for the owners.

OpenDesk offers authors to self-publish books while sharing the revenue with contributors. Once published, authors have full control over the market supply of the book. Revenue is also generated from the royalty paid as compensation by readers for exchanging books. Authors can distribute books as donations or giveaways (promotional), which are different from books bought from the marketplace as they cannot be exchanged or rented.

Both these platforms combined, connect readers directly with authors, thus eliminating intermediaries. The most obvious benefits of this ecosystem include cheaper books to readers and complete revenue goes to the authors and contributors (if any).

Challenges we ran into

This project is the upgraded version of OpenShelf | OpenDesk built during the period of BUIDL IT 2021 Hackathon. We have redesigned our contracts to improve the renting mechanism and overall scalability of the project. Many security and upgradeability concerns have been taken care of by using OpenZeppelin Contracts. We now use a newly created subgraph to index required data from the blockchain, therefore, cutting down gas fees significantly which was ought to be paid to store all the data on-chain. Designing the schema and mapping, which have been countlessly modified, was a major challenge successfully overcome by the team's efforts. Although renting works flawlessly on the front, there are some security issues, we have identified during testing. We are working to fix them at the earliest.

 

New Functionalities

• Add contributors, their roles, and share in the revenue (Also receives a fresh copy after publishing).
• Support for multiple editions and series of books
• Create and accept offers for e-book NFTs (inspired by OpenSea)
• Displaying all stats(sales, revenue, transfer volume, ...) of published books on the contributor's dashboard.
• Publisher can now change price, royalty, market supply, withdraw and distribute revenue among contributors at any time.
• Improved UI/UX

 

Participation in previous hackathons

• BUIDL IT 2021
• NFTHack 2022
• ETHDenver Virtual Hackathon 2022 (Since the hacking period clashes with ETHernals, the majority of the submitted work is similar, except for new features are introduced in OpenDesk)