No doubt everyone has picked up a paper book at some point in their lives, whether that be textbooks, novels, or comics. These books are an important form of content that sparks our intellectual curiosity and furthers the development of our culture.

Inspired by its mission of “unleashing a virtuous cycle of literary creation”, the MEDIA DO Group has continued to grow through businesses centered on the distribution of eBooks rather than paper books. We have done so by capitalizing on the society-wide move to embrace digital technologies as we sought to help contribute to the development of Japanese culture and of a more fulfilling society. Digital technologies became even further entrenched in our daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, which spurred the widespread adoption of teleworking and otherwise transformed society on a very fundamental level. Today, however, with the restrictions on movement and expectations of wearing masks that emerged around the world amid the pandemic largely gone, we are reminded of the precious nature of physical connections. The pandemic truly served to highlight the value of such physical connections, something that cannot be replicated through digital technologies.

Against this backdrop, Japan’s eBook market continues to show smooth growth. Conversely, the publishing industry faces serious challenges in the form of the ongoing decline of paper book publishing and the brick-and-mortar bookstores that sell such physical publications.

I believe that brick-and-mortar bookstores are a cornerstone of our culture and an important and community-rooted antenna for broadcasting content. There is no replacing the invaluable opportunities their wide sales floors grant to discover new genres of art, new worlds that one might have never imagined otherwise.

FanTop, one of MEDIA DO’s strategic investment businesses, is a venture aimed at energizing physical bookstores and the physical publication industry as a whole through the use of non-fungible token (NFT) technologies. By attaching digital NFT benefits to physical publications, it is possible to increase both the selling prices and the sales rates of these publications. Moreover, the expansion of the functionality of the FanTop platform is anticipated to grant asset value to digital content, to which it was previously difficult to assign value due to the reproducibility of said content.

This is a venture on which we were able to embark thanks to the trust earned from the publishing industry over our years of involvement in the eBook distribution business and our unique position as an intermediary between publishers and eBook distributors. At MEDIA DO, we are committed to the ongoing development of this business, through which we hope to contribute to the growth of the publishing industry as well as that of the greater content industry.