Living Books will focus predominantly on affirmative projects (and related ideas and concepts), projects that are exploring alternative futures for the book, the difficulties mentioned thus far notwithstanding.

This is for the simple reason that it can be argued that the humanities have always been in crisis and that humanities book publishing has never been financially self-sustainable.9 Similarly, the intention here is not to overcome this condition via the route of technological utopianism (wherein innovative digital solutions will resolve the crisis) or the search for new sustainable business models or by defending an idealized past system of values associated with the (printed) book and the humanities. Instead, it might be more useful to embrace this “crisis” or messiness to some extent, in order to explore the potentialities