{"id":753611,"date":"2026-11-15T22:55:21","date_gmt":"2026-11-15T19:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/flaming-hydras-new-kickstarter-campaign-rethinks-e-book-ownership-and-digital-lending\/"},"modified":"2026-11-15T22:55:21","modified_gmt":"2026-11-15T19:55:21","slug":"flaming-hydras-new-kickstarter-campaign-rethinks-e-book-ownership-and-digital-lending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/flaming-hydras-new-kickstarter-campaign-rethinks-e-book-ownership-and-digital-lending\/","title":{"rendered":"Flaming Hydra\u2019s new Kickstarter campaign rethinks e-book ownership and digital lending"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here\u2019s a big promise: A new Kickstarter campaign aims to usher in the \u201creturn of the human internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the tagline of a crowdfunding campaign for The Phoenix Project<\/a>, an initiative from the online culture and commentary magazine Flaming Hydra<\/a>. If you back The Phoenix Project, you\u2019re supporting three things \u2014 a one-off print magazine designed to celebrate \u201cthe values and fun of the early internet,\u201d a new e-book service for libraries, and a news<\/a>letter subscript<\/a>ion\/archiving program that\u2019s also designed for libraries.<\/p>\n

To Flaming Hydra\u2019s lead editor Maria Bustillos, these disparate projects are \u201cbasically all one thing,\u201d tied together by the goal of \u201cprotecting freedom of information\u201d and fulfilling the \u201cpromise of the early internet, where you\u2019re making information available to as many people as possible, while still protecting the right of artists and authors to make a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bustillos told me that these issues have been highlighted on Flaming Hydra itself, for example when Tal Levin wrote about finding countless AI-generated clones<\/a> of his book on Amazon. By \u201ccreating an ecosystem that is based in people working together, who are offering their stuff in a context that is controlled and doesn\u2019t allow\u201d others to create and sell AI-generated clones, Bustillos said Flaming Hydra is \u201cpart of the human project.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is not this unstoppable force,\u201d she added. \u201cIf people just set up publishing pipelines and networks and organizations that are dedicated to the human internet, people who want to read stuff can go to them, and it\u2019s actually completely isolated from mechanistic interference.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Phoenix Project fits into this vision by making the work of human writers more accessible to libraries.<\/p>\n

Back in 2020, Bustillos wrote about the e-book systems<\/a> dominating libraries and schools. In one example, instead of just buying a book, a school had to pay $27 per student per year for continued access to copies of \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is symptomatic of a broader system that treats true ownership of e-books and other digital media<\/a> as a thing of the past. Instead, we \u201clicense\u201d these e-books from their publishers, and they can be altered or removed at any time.<\/p>\n

\u201cE-books are books,\u201d Bustillos said. \u201cThey\u2019re not some other thing. They are books, and people should be able to own them, and libraries should be able to own them, and media should be able to be owned. All digital media should be able to be owned.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her view, ownership boils down to a simple question: \u201cIf you are at the mercy of somebody who can shut the book off, you do not own it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So even beyond the question of ongoing payments, there have also been examples of e-books being altered<\/a> or removed from readers\u2019 devices long after their purchase. Bustillos acknowledged that for individual pieces of media, this distinction may not seem like a big deal, \u201cbut if it\u2019s all the textbooks for everybody, if it\u2019s all the books,\u201d then it\u2019s a real problem.<\/p>\n

Flaming Hydra and The Phoenix Project seek to solve this by letting libraries truly purchase and own e-books. They can then lend those e-books to their patrons through a new, open source \u201clibrary in a box\u201d system called Lenny for Libraries<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Phoenix Project is starting by offering five new e-books from Flaming Hydra writers, including collections of writing from The Awl, and of essays by Tom Scocca and Bustillos herself. That might sound like a relatively small start, but Bustillos said she\u2019s talking to library consortiums and author groups, and the goal here is to \u201cchange the conversation\u201d around e-books and digital archiving and lending. So The Phoenix Project could be paving the way for other initiatives that follow a similar model.<\/p>\n

Similarly, The Phoenix Foundry Archive is designed to make paywalled newsletter content available to libraries. Bustillos noted that \u201cso much of the best journalism, criticism, essays\u201d is now being published in paywalled newsletters that are inaccessible to libraries (as well as the Internet Archive).<\/p>\n

With Phoenix, newsletter writers (starting with those who use Ghost, with support for additional newsletter platforms coming in the future) will be able to offer subscriptions to libraries, similar to the way libraries can subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Once it\u2019s set up, Phoenix will automatically convert whichever newsletter posts the writer wants into EPUB documents, which are then sent to libraries for digital lending.<\/p>\n

Flaming Hydra has been working on all this even before launching the Kickstarter, and Bustillos said she was grateful for the financial support from backers like Anand Raganathan, Brewster Kahle, and Paul Ford. But by turning to crowdfunding, Bustillos said Flaming Hydra can better protect the work, ensuring that it remains sustainable and independent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have to be at the mercy of anybody, and it also protects editorial independence,\u201d she said. \u201cThose things go hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flaming Hydra seeks to raise $30,000 for The Phoenix Project<\/a>, with the campaign ending on November 27.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a big promise: A new Kickstarter campaign aims to usher in the \u201creturn of the human internet.\u201d That\u2019s the tagline of a crowdfunding campaign for The Phoenix Project, an initiative from the online culture and commentary magazine Flaming Hydra. If you back The Phoenix Project, you\u2019re supporting three things \u2014 a one-off print magazine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":753612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-601797365.jpg?resize=1200,800","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[151443,70917],"class_list":["post-753611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-media-entertainment","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}