The Spanish ‘Indignados’ movement represents one of the first historical expressions of a native p2p movement, born from the networked generation, their desires for a better life and their discontent with a dying system. Bernardo Gutierrez (i.e. @bernardosampa) , himself an insider and participant, kept track of the networked communication that preceded and accompanied its emergence, and has written a remixable novel about it.

Excerpted from Julieta Lionetti, who focuses on the innovative publishing model:

“#24H, whose title recalls a Twitter hashtag, can be edited by any registered user on the open platform booki. Gutiérrez, who describes himself as the book’s “nigh-author,” says that if the print book belongs to the order of architecture, his experiment is a deconstructible building. “Any reader can disrupt the book. You can read it from beginning to end. Or sideways. Or you can obliterate parts of it. You can print whatever chapter or fragment you want thanks to a tagging system. A book is as many books as it has readers,” he says, maybe unaware of the fact that he’s citing a Western tradition that goes back at least to Rome.

Gutiérrez concedes that there’s some trickery involved in the linear reconstruction of time needed to tell the story of those hours that preceded the first Spanish protests against the euro crisis as it developed itself on the Internet. “Time is fragmented, it has no territory, it’s convex and it’s concave. A day on YouTube has 50,400 hours of video,” he says and immediately adds with a flourish of baroque excess, “2,100 days fit into one day; 70 months in one hour.” The book has links, echoes, tweets in flux, exits, tunnels, readers that hole up in parallel chats. “Trickery,” he sums up.

Aside from the Creative Commons license that frees the content for readers’ active participation, #24H needed an authoring and publishing tool that made collaboration easier. They chose BookType, launched in beta last February at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York. BookType is also pivotal to another challenge the author presented to his publisher. He calls them “occupy platforms,” which in the trade jargon means tools for a multi-channel strategy. “#24H is about a movement that occupied the public space to express their discontent, therefore the book must occupy all the possible platforms,” says Gutiérrez. #24H is available for reading (and remixing) online, as a downloadable pdf that you pay for with a tweet, as a remix for print on demand through Lulu and Bubok or at the Kindle Store or as a DRM-free epub that you can read on any device that supports the format.”