The Book That Answers Back

Every reader knows the moment: the last page turns, a question remains, and there is nowhere to put it. For five hundred years that silence was simply the price of print, along with an author's unprovable manuscript, the languages the big stores decline to carry, the royalty statement as the only window, and never, not once, a reader's question carried back. This book names that arrangement the frozen page, and describes, mechanism by mechanism, what replaces it.
▎
▎ Part by part, it walks the working alternative: authorship claimed in public, before the sale, a dated notice open to challenge, anchored to a public blockchain nobody has to trust; publication without gatekeepers, in every language and script, under the author's own imprint, with distribution the author can actually see; and then the living book itself, margins that carry the author's ongoing commentary, an AI that answers only from the book and admits what it does not say, and readers' questions that reach the author by name and come back answered.