Of course, that's just a specific instance of the more general problem of "we need a proper storefront interface for doing business using steem/SDB as a currency," which is a problem that you would've thought the developers at Steemit Inc. would have wanted to get out the door on about day five, since the idea of a currency that no one takes in exchange for anything is a little silly.

The problem with selling any kind of media these days is proceeding under the assumption that it can't/won't be immediately pirated, and for good reasons.

I would love to have some kind of solution which would reward people for writing evergreen content; there is entirely too much focus on creating for the ephemeral and ignoring the idea that you might want to produce something that is useful and rewarded outside of an extremely narrow time slice. But you can't do that with the steem blockchain. There's no advantage to doing so and no system by which it would be worthwhile to do so.

I suspect that if there is a desire for curated, serialized fiction or nonfiction in a blockchain context, that particular itch will be scratched when hardfork 20 comes out with communities, which themselves can be run like a curated publication, accept submissions, only re-steem/publish the pieces that they decide are worthwhile, and get their money from the curation of a specific type of content while the authors get their money from the up votes. It means that authors can't get rewarded after a week, even if a new reader discovers them, unless they're constantly producing content, which is going to be self-limiting in a number of ways – but odds are it will work better than what we see on the table here.

I'm just trying to find a use case that works for DBooks and I'm just not finding it.