  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.
