Vulgo
Vulgo is a F/LOSS toolkit for publishing and sharing books and other long-form texts over the Web.
Making use of Free software and Free Licenses, Vulgo represents a sustainable and critical approach to sharing texts online. Its ambition is to coordinate tools and methods to overcome the current hegemony of corporate platforms in book diffusion.
The problem with the dominance of companies such as Google Books and Amazon is clear, when querying for a book on a search engine will most often show their results above those of the publisher itself. Vulgo's aim is to develop appropriate software toolkits designed to support publishers and authors outside of the bankrupt extractive systems of corporate giants and intellectual property law.
Our workflow for online publishing is characterized by two main aspects:
- Its publishing pipeline uses plain text and light markup formats as inputs, and prioritizes HTML and EPUB formats as outputs, downsizing the role of PDF — an ex-proprietary format not appropriate for reading in the browser.
- Its FLOShare function invites readers to help in the diffusion of texts, by referencing to the original source. When you select a piece of text, a pop-up appears to allow you to share it on social media or by mail, including a backlink to the original text and a clear mention of the license.
The combination of these two aspects constitutes Vulgo's first step towards a software ecology of hybrid publishing. The book you hold in your hands has been published via the Vulgo publishing pipeline both in paper form and in digital form at
For more information on Vulgo, please write us at
info@vulgo.xyz