The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Everything (pocket edition) is a mutually owned book commons for Guides.
# Guide To Everything (Pocket Edition)
Instead of a single, fixed reference book sold by a publisher, it is a living bundle of small, themed Guides that are: - Co-owned by their contributors and readers. - Printed, stocked and sold through independent bookshops. - Maintained as a shared digital commons that can be forked, remixed and reprinted. It applies Regovernance and Deshitification to the structure of the book itself and to the platform that coordinates its development, printing and distribution.
# Guides As A Commons The pocket edition is organised as a set of modular Guides. - Each Guide is a small, self-contained section or booklet on a specific topic, with its own contributors and history. - Guides can be combined into a physical “pocket edition” for a given print run, or browsed digitally as separate pages. - The default licence allows remixing and reprinting, as long as the commons rules are respected. Ownership is mutual. - Contributors co-own the content through a commons licence and the cooperative that stewards the project. - Independent bookshops co-own the distribution layer through the same or a related cooperative. - Readers are invited into governance via memberships or local groups, not only as customers. The Guide is not a product line owned by one publisher. It is a shared reference that independent actors keep alive together.
# Regovernance Of The Guide The Guide uses Regovernance to avoid becoming another centralised publishing platform. - The editorial and technical infrastructure are treated as Commons Infrastructure, not as a startup asset. - The cooperative can continually adjust how much energy goes into new features, new Guides and new formats versus maintaining a lean, low-cost platform. There is a simple governance slider. - One end is “cheap, stable, slow change”. - The other end is “richer features, more ambitious editing tools, higher shared costs”. Each cycle, members vote where to put the slider. - Moving towards “cheap and stable” focuses on editing existing Guides, simplifying schemas and keeping printing and distribution as low-cost as possible. - Moving towards “more features” authorises shared investment in things like richer annotation tools, better Hitchhiker Passport integrations or new translation workflows. The same slider governs both the digital commons and the physical pocket edition pipeline.
# Pooling Costs By Ability To Pay Costs are pooled across participants according to ability to pay. - Independent bookshops contribute according to size and turnover, with smaller shops paying less and larger ones more. - Contributor-members can pay modest fees or contribute work instead, such as editing, testing, translating or community moderation. - Sympathetic institutions can sponsor whole Guides or translation projects. The aim is to keep access cheap. - Digital access to the Guides remains free or very low cost. - Pocket editions are priced to keep local printing and bookshop margins sustainable, while still being affordable. Regovernance ensures that if the platform or printing pipeline starts to feel expensive, members can deliberately push the slider back towards simplicity and cost reduction.
# Spec Driven Development For Guides New features and structural changes are shaped through Spec Driven Development. - Anyone can propose a spec for a new Guide type, a new metadata field, a new layout pattern or a new integration with Book Stock Export Aggregation. - Specs are written in plain language, with a small technical appendix where needed. - The cooperative reviews and ratifies specs in governance cycles, based on the current slider position and available resources. Examples. - A “Micro-Guide” spec that defines ultra-short Guides suitable for printing as inserts or stickers for existing pocket editions. - A “Local Edition” spec that defines how a city or region can publish a focused pocket edition using a subset of Guides plus local content. - A “Bookshop Coop Store Integration” spec that standardises how Guides appear in the shared catalogue for print-on-demand and pre-orders. This keeps changes intentional and documented, instead of drifting into opaque platform behaviour.
# Integration With Bookshop Coop Store The pocket edition is designed to work with a Bookshop Coop Store rather than bypass independent bookshops. - Every official pocket edition has an ISBN and appears in the shared catalogue built from Book Stock Export Aggregation. - Local bookshops can order copies through their usual channels or participate in local print runs initiated by the cooperative. - Special local editions can be created with region-specific Guides, co-branded between bookshops and the Guide commons. Regovernance ensures that the Guide does not become its own central online retailer. - Sales through the coop store route payments directly to bookshops. - The Guide commons may receive a small, transparent share to cover editing and infrastructure, as agreed in governance cycles. - There is no per-sale platform cut beyond what members have explicitly voted for. The result is a mutually reinforcing loop between the book commons and the bookshop commons.
# Agentic Development And Editioning Agentic Development and Vibe Coding are used to maintain and extend the Guide. Agents can help with. - Converting Guide drafts from wiki pages into print-ready layouts. - Checking references, dates and ISBNs in entries that talk about books or bookshops. - Generating stock CSVs for pocket editions, so they can be included in bookshop inventory systems. Humans remain responsible for. - Tone, ethics and political choices in the Guides. - Governance decisions about which specs to adopt and where to place the cost slider. - Final editorial decisions for each pocket edition. Agents are tools for deshitification, not hidden owners of the platform.
# Deshitification Of The Guide Ecosystem The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Everything (pocket edition) is also an experiment in Deshitification. Instead of. - Centralised publishing pipelines that control access, terms and formats. - Platform-owned “community content” sites where contributors cede rights in exchange for visibility. - Proprietary guide apps that arrive with friendly features and then slowly enshittify as monetisation rises. The Guide offers. - A shared, forkable content commons. - Transparent rules for pooling costs and deciding features. - A tight relationship with independent bookshops and local communities. If the Guide starts to drift into bloat or capture, the regovernance mechanisms exist to pull it back. - Members can push the slider towards “lower costs” and approve specs that simplify and prune. - Local forks of the pocket edition can be created if the main line becomes misaligned with community needs. - Bookshops can re-balance which Guides they stock, surface or promote, based on local demand.
# Relationship To Other Pages The pocket edition sits at the intersection of several ideas. - Regovernance for continual, community-led adjustment of rules and costs. - Deshitification as a strategy to rebuild platform-like functions as commons. - Bookshop Coop Store and Book Stock Export Aggregation as the infrastructure that keeps the book part alive. - Hitchhiker Passport and related identity tools for participation, authorship and voting. Together, they sketch a world where a Hitchhiker’s Guide is not a single, fixed book but a cooperative, evolving pocket companion that belongs to its readers, writers and local bookshops.