Federated Publishing Changes are hammering the publishing industry, which is belatedly adapting to change--but only moving around incrementally, staying inside or a few steps outside its traditional walls. FLOSS Manuals is trying something quite different, placing ourselves squarely inside a new space where content is free (libre) as far as feasibly possible. The space in which FLOSS Manuals operates can be termed Federated Publishing. Federated Publishing is not a model, but is better considered a network of models, enabling multiple approaches to content production, distribution, and consumption. At this point, as we see it within FLOSS Manuals, the space is enabled by four core elements: * Digitally networked corpora of works * Interoperable free/libre licensed content * Federated open book production and "publishing" platforms * People participating This space facilitates traditional, established book production techniques while fueling radically different approaches. Federated Publishing is currently best illustrated, I believe, in FLOSS Manuals, an organization I founded five years ago. Starting as an alternative to publishers for communities that were inadequately served by them, we have found ourselves migrating back into the field of publishing, with significant reforms to offer. We have broken many established practices because we didn't know any better. We have developed our own web-based writing, book production, publishing and coordination tools to meet our goals. At the five-year point, our position vis-a-vis traditional industries is ambiguous, finding us simultaneously inside and outside publishing. In the FLOSS Manuals system, books have no Authors--and no Publishers (capital A, capital P) for that matter. No one really cares much about attribution. But quality is high, and perhaps most important, books *live*--they are constantly updated and improved. Books are also produced fast - in fact, high quality text books can be are produced in times measured in days, hours, or minutes. Books have multiple channels and multiple contexts. Content is shifted between contexts rapidly and easily, people get paid, reputations get made, and economies evolve. Books migrate with little effort across languages, taken to them by eager volunteers who want to bring their benefits to their own communities. All the content is free, we provide all the tools we make under a free license as well, and we make it easy for you to take anything you want from us. Our website, templates, books, community, platform--whatever you like. Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network theory, which itself is born out of a need to transform proprietary network services into a modern Free Software critique. Federated Publishing is not in itself a critique, it is an active and vibrant practice - but it is born from this ideological legacy. Federated Publishing was anticipated by this astonishing passage from Marshall McLuhan (“Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966),” interview with Robert Fulford, May 8, 1966, on CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days): “Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems … and they at once Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.” Many quote this passage as a prophesy of the Internet to come. However it is not a vision of the Internet, but a vision of the book and Federated Publishing. While FLOSS Manuals has grown substantially, expanded its scope beyond the free software movement for which it as created, and learned how to increase the size and depth of each book we produce, traditional publishing has gone off in different direction, trying to invent a new proprietary future for itself. We can now understand this proprietorship, given the contrast presented by Federated Publishing, in a broad sense that goes far beyond closed copyrights. In fact proprietary behaviour also pervades content that is purportedly offered for free, but comes encumbered with provisions that restrict its use and evolution. The proprietary attitude dominates the search for new distribution formats and economic models, reward systems for authors and others, and fuels an unwillingness to make content interoperable on a technical, legal, or social cultural level. Tying yourself to the content you produce and preventing its freedom like this is a tiring and resource-consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and knowledge. FLOSS Manuals actively encourages anyone to make a book, a chapter, or an edit. We encourage anyone to alter a book for the needs of an individual or a community, to take it to their own domain, translate it, reuse it, break it up, voice multiple discordant positions and concerns within the same covers, and break the use of 'I' as a dominant identifier for a single individual author. Or just take the book without changing a word and make yourself a million euro, yen, or dollars. No problems. We aim to generate federated, interoperable corpora enabled by common sense technology and an increasing consciousness that a book is 'ours' to do as 'I', you, we, or they want. We are starting with free manuals and aim to provide an example of what is possible within and between domains. In this environment, books transform: they migrate across contexts, are translated, are kept alive, are used the world over to help people learn about free software, are of extremely good quality, and provide economies for those that wish to pursue the seemingly radical practices. Does it sound impossible to have an economy here? Is this another free culture revolution without a strategy to pay the rent? FLOSS Manuals is finding revenues from organizations that benefit from the free flow of information. It benefits from the incredibly tight integration of effort made possible by the Internet, a level of integration Marshall McLuhan might not have been able to imagine. The Net has brought social production networks to a such a scale that the person on the other end of McLuhan's telephone line is an asynchronous network of people you never met, and you as well. You make books with others, you collectively decide what a book is and what goes in it, and others add ideas and content that either you don't know how to produce or can't produce in time. People pay for that, and they pay for you to help them do that. It is the beginning of Federated Publishing services, not the end of publishing.