You do know that nobody wants to rent books, right? This is a publication methodology that has been tried before – and ultimately just ends up encouraging people to find ways to transfer what is purely text content into a more distributable, useful format.

In fact, for anyone that cares, DRM might as well not even exist right now.

If there's one thing that we've learned about book publication (and if we're honest, any form of media), it's that if it is possible to acquire something more conveniently than piracy for a few dollars, people will do it – but DRM puts a speed bump there, making piracy far more attractive.

If the content is still available for free on Steemit, then that's definitely not going to be a great thing.

And you conveniently skated to the side to avoid my question about how books will be rewarded after the seven day Steemit posting. Instead, you've brought up a new question:

• If I'm going to have to maintain different publishing formats in order to provide structure to the dbooks system, why shouldn't I post directly to Amazon or Google Books directly, given that it's relatively easy to do so and both of them will pay me in real money?

You've decided to take on two methods of distribution simultaneously, both of which seem to have fairly inherently superior advantages. PDFs and e-books are easy to generate from content, especially content already largely marked up with Markdown. Steemit already provides voting rewards without giving up a 20% cut to you guys, just from straight posting. What are you offering that is better than the current options in self publication for longform content?

I think I'd rather have this discussion here than Discord, where other people who may be interested can see it in context and it is nowhere near as ephemeral.

These are the questions that serious writers need the answers to.