The Era of Decentralized Publishing

The ISBN number and the bar code comes with most of the books that you buy in the bookstore. You won’t pay much attention to this number as you know it’s a kind of “global” thing that book publisher “registers” to an international organisation. Should it be called ISBN Agency? No one really care in general.

Similar numbers and bar codes you will see in the back of every goods you purchase in supermarket, it speeds up our life when we get through the cashier counter. Same thing, consumers doesn’t really care about who’s maintaining these numbers and barcodes as long as they can saveme 10 mins in each queue.

Think about the coin from the other side: how about if you are an author, a book publisher or you are a goods producers? Would it be easy to use a global unique identifier (GID) that people can search your book no matter what language they speaking or where they are? Would it be convenient to provide a comparatively easy way for your distributors, sellers to manage the inventory with a GID that no other products will be using? (Certainly there will still be inevitable situation that people will use fake GID, but that’s not the topic I want to bring out in this article).

Intenational ISBN Agency and GS1 has been doing a good job since their establishment in 1970 and 1974 respectively, providing a mechanism for book publisher and goods producers to obtain this GID, maintaining a look-like-easy-but-error-prone database so that people in the ecosystem can leverage.

It’s an inspirational moment when I got introduced by the concept of ISCN (International Standard Content Number) that every piece of digital content, no matter it is in the form of text, sound, picture, video or animiation, creator can get the GlD of that piece of digital content through a permissionless mechanism. Content consumer can validate the authenticity of that piece of content by making a simple query in a publicly available infrastructure for free. 

There is no organisation like International ISBN Agency or GS1 under this decentralised concept. Everyone can get their digital creation registered and authenticated in a matter of minutes or even seconds. 

Certainly, the way to streamline the whole process of ISCN registration and content publishing still has room to improve. Sky is the limit and believing the 4 years-old Likecoin community will excel it further such that content creators can truly enjoy the beauty of decentralised publishing. 

It’s not around the corner. It’s just at the back of the door!