As per a May 17 news reports on Nikkei, Media Do Holdings intends to invest ¥300 million (equates to about $2.85 million) for the creation of a distributed ledger for the distribution of company’s e-books in the next two years, beginning late 2020.
The company pointed out that the DLT platform will enable maintaining a trustworthy transaction history for e-books thereby making it easy to resell used copies, while making payments to both writers and publishers.
Media Do intends to implement the distributed ledger technology in My Anime List, a manga and anime social networking platform and one of its associate firms.
Media Do Holdings President Kyoji Fujita said:
The strength of e-books lies in the convenience of being able to purchase and use them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The situation caused by the coronavirus will allow us to recognize the value of e-books and increase their use.
The e-book distributor is presently associated with more than 2,000 publishers and 150 e-bookstores (online). Even before the world shifted to remote working and stay-at-home routine, the company posted e-book sales worth $600 million for the fiscal year ended February 2020.
In April, Media Do posted a 20% y-o-y rise in e-book sales, primarily due to shutdown of schools and bookstores amid the coronavirus outbreak and declaration of emergency in Japan.
Al though Prime Minister Shinzo Abe terminated such limitations on a major portion of Japan last week, top cities such as Tokyo continue to remain under an emergency state, which was announced April 16.