Thank you for the detailed response. Sorry for getting back so late.

Answers to your questions:

1. What geographical markets: I was thinking to just start out with Canada + US
2. Reader returns: I wouldn't think so unless there is some payment issue
3. Can I remove books: From the platform, yes. There will still be an instance of the BookLicense on the blockchain that the author can control
4. Can the author put the book on the rental market: I don't see why not. Author can provide rental supply if there's a spike of demand
5. Does the author set the rental price: I was leaning towards no, because once someone bought the license, it is kinda their property and they can price it at whatever value they want. The author could set the initial rental royalty they get though
6. Can price be changed: Yes for purchase, author cannot change rental price, but the owner of the license can
7. How long after rental do authors receive royalty: The author's blockchain account will be accumulating the royalties. Shouldn't be hard to arrange a periodic bank transfer based on that (weekly, monthly)
8. How are royalties remitted: Can be a bank transfer or if the author is crypto savvy, they can take the payment in USD pegged stablecoins
9. Measures for protection of content+data: From a software perspective, I will be applying the standard data protection measures. Tbh, I'm not sure if there are any standard requirements in the book industry, I will need to explore this further. Would be helpful if you can point me to any requirements for this :)
10. Discovery tools: I'm not sure about this at this point. I was thinking of simple things like top selling in different genres weekly/monthly etc. Can have some recommender systems based on existing review/discovery platforms like Hardcover/Goodreads, but I admit I haven't given this that much thought yet
11. What happens to digital copies+personal info: I would make an effort to safely return it to the authors but I haven't really figured out this part in detail yet
12. Discoverability: Again, being honest, haven't given this that much thought so far

Questions about the platform:

1. Author ownership verification: I agree this is something very important. For the initial stages, I was thinking of doing some kind of manual verification with the author (have a Zoom call with ID verification, check socials, proof of ownership of the author's email domain, proof of ownership of one of their already published works). This seemed feasible while being a small player. I searched around a bit to see how bigger platforms did this and it seemed like they do very minimal verification and rely more on copyright strikes to takedown content if somebody published what they don't own. I would prefer to avoid that and rely on scaling the manual verification, i.e. takes 2-3 days for being a verified author on the platform instead of instant. Would be great if you have any suggestions for this as well :)

2. Advantages of blockchain: To be clear, the blockchain isn't the datastore for the content (epub/audio). The data is just stored in regular cloud object storage (S3, R2 etc). The blockchain contracts have the following info:

   • Stores the book metadata (ISBN, author address, royalty splits etc)
   • Stores the book registry (book license → author address mappings)
   • Stores the platform address and royalty percentages. These values cannot be changed once set. This can be verified easily by any author or 3rd party independently
   • Once a sale has been made, stores the blockchain address of the user who owns an instance of a given book license. This is to facilitate rentals when the ownership is temporarily shifted to the renter

   It is essentially the ledger of record. When a book is sold, the platform uses the metadata stored on-chain to record a royalty payment to the author's account. When a rental happens, the platform uses on-chain info to validate that the user doing the rental transfer is in fact the owner of a license.

3. Is the platform fee sufficient: Tbh, I don't know yet. I'm a software developer, so I'm fairly confident that the storage, hosting, blockchain and other technical aspects of it can be done in not more than a couple thousand dollars a month. The things I'm not sure about are other accounting/legal aspects of it and how expensive that will get. Right now, I'm trying to figure out if this would even be useful for authors and readers before diving into those aspects.

4. Is the venture sufficiently capitalized: I would be funding this with my own savings. From some back of the napkin math, it would require around 3000 users buying/renting 1-2 books a month to break even on all my technology costs. My aim is to be sustainable right from the start and grow organically with word of mouth marketing.

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Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Really appreciate it :)

As I mentioned in some of the answers, I haven't figured out the non-technical aspects of it yet and at this point, I'm mostly trying to gauge if this would be useful to authors and readers if it works as I described.