Book to the Future - a manifesto for book liberation

TL;DR

The paper advocates for a radical shift in publishing towards free, digital, and open-source models to democratize knowledge and reduce costs, challenging current corporate and capitalist constraints.

Contribution

It proposes a comprehensive framework for book liberation, emphasizing free access, digital transformation, and open-source infrastructure as key to reforming publishing.

Findings

Open access publications should be free at the point of reading.

Digital formats enable reuse and computational analysis.

Open Source publishing infrastructure can lower costs and accelerate publishing.

Abstract

The Book Liberation Manifesto is an exploration of publishing outside of current corporate constraints and beyond the confines of book piracy. We believe that knowledge should be in free circulation to benefit humankind, which means an equitable and vibrant economy to support publishing, instead of the prevailing capitalist hand-me-down system of Sisyphean economic sustainability. Readers and books have been forced into pirate libraries, while sales channels have been monopolised by the big Internet giants which exact extortionate fees from publishers. We have three proposals. First, publications should be free-at-the-point-of-reading under a variety of open intellectual property regimes. Second, they should become fully digital -- in order to facilitate ready reuse, distribution, algorithmic and computational use. Finally, Open Source software for publishing should be treated as public infrastructure, with sustained research and investment. The result of such robust infrastructures will mean lower costs for manufacturing and faster publishing lifecycles, so that publishers and publics will be more readily able to afford to invent new futures. For more information on the Hybrid Publishing Consortium.