For publishers
Bring your books into your readers' context.
Your readers are increasingly working through AI agents — Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT — that reach for tools when a question needs structured help. Books aren't yet among the tools agents can call. We change that, in partnership with you and the author, with no production cost to either of you.
The case
When a reader of your book sits down to apply it — drafting a charter, planning a workshop, reviewing a governance proposal — they increasingly do that work alongside an AI agent. The agent's answer to "what does Bollier say about clear boundaries?" comes from one of three places: paraphrased training data (uncited, partial, frozen at the cutoff); a 200-page paste of the book if the reader happens to own a PDF (wasteful, blocked for paywalled text); or a structured tool the agent can call.
Books-as-tools is the third option. We translate one of your titles into a small, opinionated MCP server — 8 to 13 tools the agent invokes when the question warrants it, each returning a cited passage with chapter and page intact. The agent only pulls what's relevant; the reader sees a citation that points them back to your edition; the author gets attribution at the point of use. You get a new surface for an existing title without writing a new product.
The context-engineering case in full — and the pipeline we run on each source — is on how it works.
How a partnership works
We propose to start small. One book. One author. Four weeks of build. A working MCP installed for a handful of people — you, the author, your representative, and us — to use for a week before anything is shared more widely.
The pilot does three things at once: proves the artifact works for the book in question, surfaces every author-contract and licensing question that needs answering, and gives all of us something concrete to base the model conversation on. We cover the build. Nothing is published, sold, or distributed during the pilot without explicit consent from you and the author. If the pilot answers the author's question and yours, we look together at what comes next.
A pilot, week by week
- Week 0 Book and author selected. Author signs a one-paragraph permission (template below). 30 minutes total from you and the author together.
- Weeks 1–2 Extraction. Same pipeline that built Plurality and Think Like a Commoner — text-driven, no author work required during this phase.
- Week 3 Tool design and review. The author can adjust voice and emphasis on the tool set before it's wrapped.
- Week 4 Working MCP installed for the pilot group. We use it for a week and compare notes. Decide together what's next.
What you keep · what we ask for
What you keep
- Full rights to the book. The MCP is derivative, not a replacement.
- Author attribution on every citation the MCP returns.
- Control over what happens after the pilot — public, gated, private, scrapped.
- Co-ownership of the MCP, the legal template we converge on, and everything we learn.
What we ask for
- A signed one-paragraph permission from the author for the pilot scope.
- 30 minutes from you to align on the book and the author.
- An open conversation about a sustainable model if the pilot works.
The author permission
The smallest legal thing that lets the pilot run. The wording below is a starting point; you and the author will adjust it to fit your existing arrangements.
I, [author name], grant Book Power permission to build an MCP server derived from my book [title] ([Publisher], [year]) for the purpose of a private pilot. The pilot artifact will be installable only by the named pilot group, and will not be distributed publicly or to third parties without my written consent. This permission is valid until [date] and is revocable on seven days' notice.
If it works — the model conversation
If the pilot works, we have something concrete to base the larger conversation on. The questions that need answering at that point are publisher questions: how does this become a sustainable surface, who gets paid for what, what's the relationship to existing rights, how it sits alongside an audio or translation deal.
The questions we'd want to take into that conversation:
- Chapter-based access. Does the MCP charge per use, per chapter, per book?
- Author share. What fraction of revenue flows to the author, on what terms?
- Distribution. Public catalog, gated to your customers, or sold separately?
- Exclusivity. Does our build for you preclude other arrangements you may have or want?
These are real, hard questions. We don't carry fixed answers into the room. The pilot exists so that conversation has a working artifact between us, not abstractions.
Common questions
- What if the author isn't interested?
- No pilot. The author's permission is the gate; no permission, no work. We won't approach an author over a publisher's no.
- What if we want to commission a build without the pilot?
- We do paid custom builds for publishers and methodology shops. Get in touch and we'll talk about scope.
- Does this conflict with our existing AI deals?
- Probably not. An MCP is a different surface from chat-over-catalog and a different surface from a training-data license. Worth checking against the specific terms.
- Can we white-label?
- Yes. The MCP can ship under your imprint with your branding. We do the build; you do the publishing.
- What about open-license titles?
- If the book is already under an open license we may have already built it (see the catalog). If not, the build can ship as a public artifact under the same license — we've done this for Plurality (CC0), Think Like a Commoner (CC BY-NC-SA), and Governable Spaces (CC BY-NC-SA).
Get in touch
Tell us about the book and the author. We'll respond within a couple of days.