I'm aiming to drop the first Gutenbergs next week and I'll be doling out more alpha until then.

Yesterday, I shared four of the communities that supported my journey in web3 and described the free mint that will be available for their members. If you're looking to join one of these wonderful communities, head to /outcasts /page /degendao or pick up a Farcaster OG on the secondary.

Today we're moving forward by looking back.

The bibles that Johannes Gutenberg printed in the 1450s, the OG Physical Gutenbergs, combined Latin text with emergent technologies. Emergent in Europe anyway, forked from a tech stack from Asia.

Gutenberg's European fork promoted the spread of knowledge and advanced medieval society into the modern age and beyond. That was the potential I saw for the next publishing revolution when I started my web3 journey. As soon as it became possible for me to mint books as NFTs, I minted 12 Cryptoversal Gutenberg Bibles as a tribute to my favorite 15th Century dev.

The Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021 have 1284 pages you can flip through at a speed that would horrify the stewards of the 21 surviving physical copies. Flipping through the pages, opening to random sections, and finding flashes of color and the unavoidable stains, this is the only way to truly experience the beauty of this book. Over the centuries, various pages have been illustrated and illuminated by artists, turning these printed books into collaborative works of art, nature, and time.

The 12 Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021 are the first complete bibles ever minted as NFTs. At least, they are the earliest I've been able to find, for whatever it's worth to be "first" at anything in this early space.

Others have released their own Gutenbergs in the ensuing years. These have all been less complete, less accessible, and far less rare than the Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021, but each represents someone who shares a vision. We are at a moment of transformation that will be, potentially, as revolutionary as Gutenberg's 15th-Century printing press. The moment deserves all the commemoration we can provide.

The Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021 were among the first books to roll out of PageDAO's beta book-minter. They were minted into a dedicated reader app, and that app was preserved in decentralized storage to ensure durability and accessibility. No other app, server, or gatekeeper is needed. All 1284 pages are viewable from within OpenSea or directly from IPFS because these treasures belong to the world.

The giddiness we all felt in those days at the potential impact of what we were doing is something I haven't experienced again until very recently. Now, with PageDAO's current developments toward a next-generation book-minter, their first upgrade since 2021, the web3 publishing space is poised for a huge leap forward.

The time has come to commemorate the next step in a new revolution. We are moving forward, but we must also preserve our history.

I've been hodling the 12 Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021. My initial plan was to offer one for sale each year starting at a floor of 2 ETH to properly reflect their value. But 2 ETH is a lot of money to ask someone to throw down for a digital book. It prices all my frens out of the market. It would certainly price me out of the market. Plus, there are far more than 11 other people I'd like to share these books with and no way to cut them into bite-sized pieces.

Or is there?

So my new plan is to offer the Cryptoversal Gutenbergs of 2021 as communal property, if the community chooses to accept them. The upcoming Gutenbergs collection will create a community that may elect to share ownership of these early NFT books and determine their ultimate value and dispensation.

More details on that in a future alpha drop.