The World’s First Blockchain E-Book

Pan-Impact Korea has created another meaningful case using blockchain technology. In February 2021, Pan-Impact Korea successfully stored the entire book in a public blockchain and officially published an e-book with a registered ISBN. The title of the book is ‘Social Impact Bond’ and it is written in Korean.

Previously, Pan-Impact Korea had published a printed book in Korea about social impact bond, and after revising and supplementing the contents of the book, it was transformed to a blockchain e-book. For the purpose of spreading beneficial knowledge, the book price was registered as not for sale, and anyone can access the blockchain and read the book without restrictions.


【 Publishing Information 】

▶ Title : Social Impact Bond
▶ Author / Developer : Jae-Hoon Kwak
▶ Publisher : Pan-Impact Korea
▶ Blockchain : Ethereum Classic
▶ ISBN : 979-11-971273-1-1



Technological Description

It has been known that it is difficult to use a large amount of information in the blockchain due to the limitation of the smart contract capacity and the number of variables as well as the absence of hyperlink function that connect data locations.

For this reason, only a small amount of content could be stored in the blockchain, or only a single line of hash value extracted from the original data is stored in it to be compared and validated with the original data. In the latter case, in addition to blockchain work, another separate storage for the original data and verification work was required, and that is unsafe and inefficient.

On the other hand, Pan-Impact Korea developed new smart contracts to contain data of any size as the algorithm allows them to store data without limit as long as the capacity of the blockchain allows.


<Pan-Impact Korea’s implementation method of blockchain publication.>

Pan-Impact Korea divided the contents of the book into multiple book content smart contracts, and created an e-book reader smart contract that integrates all the data from book contracts. Users can view all contents of the book via one address of the e-book reader contract. Pan-Impact Korea also bypassed the absence of hyperlink and made a function that actually operates like hyperlink referring to any location of the book. In this way, it is able to store huge amount of information without limiting the number of pages.

In order to solve the problem that people cannot easily access to smart contracts in blockchain, Pan-Impact Korea also made a smart contract browser to make anyone can browse and use the smart contracts distributed by Pan-Impact Korea. This browser was jointly developed with the partner company ‘ReturnValues’, using excellent open source materials from ‘JustSmartContracts’ (https://github.com/olekon/justsmartcontracts).

Normally, it has been necessary to input several information containing complicated settings along with a contract address through a specific tool, which served as a barrier to the blockchain for ordinary people. On the other hand, Pan-Impact Korea’s smart contract browser attempted to break down barriers to the use of smart contracts by allowing people to access them through entering an address only.


The Advantages of Blockchain Publication

There are several obvious advantages of blockchain publication.

  • As long as the blockchain exists, the data is permanently preserved and the books will not disappear.
  • Anyone can access to the books since data is stored in the blockchain network distributed all over the world.
  • It is certainly efficient as data maintaining cost is not needed contrary to managing central servers.
  • Due to high security of blockchain, the original data will be kept undamaged.
  • It can be made accessible only to those who have paid the cost or have been authorized.
  • It is possible to issue a revised version through data update, and it is also possible to discontinue distribution in a simple manner by discarding the smart contracts.

Currently, though blockchain e-book is unable to express images or colors, it is very stable and reliable medium to contain text-oriented information, and it is also very efficient in terms of storage management.


Meaning and Implication

Distributing books on the blockchain can be a meaningful model for decentralization as a tool for spreading knowledge. Pan-Impact Korea attempted to develop a new medium of publication through blockchain, and made a useful use case of the technology.

Blockchain publication case has high potential for future application as it can be applied not only to books, but also to all information composed of texts in terms of recording, preserving, and viewing large amount of original data. Depending on the development method, in addition to granting access to the general public, only authorized persons can use the smart contracts, and if necessary, they can be destroyed.

Furthermore, since the entire original data is contained in the blockchain, we can eliminate unsafe and inefficient work of separating storage of the original data, guaranteeing server security, and verification of the data by comparing with the original information. Reliability is effectively ensured via blockchain.

Above all, one of our important goals is to promote SIB, an innovative policy tool that solves social problems. At least, there is an opportunity to inform people who are interested in this e-publication case or who read the book about what SIB is.

Through these attempts, if we can disseminate the innovative policy tools that are good to people and show the practical use cases as well as the potential of blockchain, it will contribute to sustainable development of our society and technology.



Read the blockchain e-book through 「smart contract browser」