Exploring the new world of collectable literature

Contributing Columnist

Remember the early days of social media, when we joked about people sharing photos of their dinner? Remember being confused about what an “app” was? That was only 15 years ago. Now, over 90% of Americans use a smartphone and a social media account. A similar transformation is coming with NFTS and digital wallets — soon they’ll be as common as video calls.

You might know that NFT stands for non-fungible token, but what that means remains allusive, and their possibilities even more nebulous. To understand, first think of the way a bank works. They keep it secure with guards and vaults and cybersecurity, but ultimately what the bank maintains is a ledger of how much money their customers have in their accounts. Cryptocurrencies

are a way of maintaining that ledger collectively, without the need for a bank overseeing it all.

In a similar way, the county clerk keeps a record of real estate transactions. The deed to your house isn’t a slip of paper in your home safe or a plaque near the front door, it’s a contract saved at the Hall of Records. An NFT is a permanent and secure public record of a contract, without the need for a central clerk, in the same way cryptocurrency removes the need for a central bank.

There are countless ways the technology is useful, from online voting to ticket sales. The California DMV is currently running a pilot program to replace paper titles with NFTS, held in a digital wallet. For authors and publishers, it means we suddenly have access to an entirely new literary economy.

I first learned about what NFTS could do for writers from Katie Dozier, founder of Thenftpoetrygallery. com. She talked me into featuring NFT poets for an issue of Rattle — but it didn’t take much convincing. For decades, I’ve been trying to solve the inherent economic problems in poetry as an industry, and it was immediately clear that NFTS might be the answer.

The problem is this: poems are a copyable commodity — that’s the whole point of poetry, which developed as a tool to use the musicality of language to aid in memory, sharing stories and copying them across generations, gathered around the fire.

But it’s difficult to sell something that can easily be copied. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” can accrue value because there will only ever be one copy. But Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, as valuable as it is, because it lives and is shared in our breath — all you need to take it with you is to memorize it, or make a quick copy for yourself.

We’re able to profit from copyable goods by creating scarcity, and keeping the price low enough that buying a copy is less trouble than making a copy for yourself. That’s how book sales actually work: publishers have to keep the profit margin low enough that pirating isn’t a problem, and then sell a high volume of copies, in order to make a profit.

As a result, literature has never been able to accrue value in the way visual art does. Poets and publishers have to hide their poems, hoping to sell many copies of their books, even though poems are meant to be shared and treasured.

But NFTS can reverse that. By having a permanent, public record of ownership, poems and books can become collectable, and begin participating in the economic paradigm visual art has been enjoying for centuries. Imagine collecting an original copy of “Leaves of Grass,” still connected to Walt Whitman’s digital wallet. Imagine coming across a poem you love on social media, and being able to buy and collect the original, with the money going straight to the author.

With NFTS, secondary sales are tied to the author’s wallet, too, so royalties can be taken any time a poem is bought or sold. Gone is the used bookstore problem, where authors receive nothing from secondary sales. An entire economy of collectable literature can emerge, in which the author is rewarded at every step.

Just last month, Ana Maria Caballero, one of the poets from Rattle’s NFT issue, sold a single poem for $11,000 at Sotheby’s auction house. No one should expect sales like that without a tremendous amount of diligent work, but I’ve been having fun this year minting and selling haiku and haiga for a few dollars each. There’s an excitement to publishing poetry this way that doesn’t exist with traditional publishing — poems suddenly feel valuable, and the interactions feel intimate. It reminds me of trading baseball cards as a kid. Imagine a world where trading poetry is that fun?

Soon, almost everyone will have a digital wallet for their car registrations and concert tickets, minted on environmentally friendly “Proof of Stake” blockchains like Tezos and Ethereum. But it will also be a digital bookshelf where literature can be collected and valued in the way that it always should have been — and always connected to the author.

Timothy Green is editor of Rattle magazine.