The crisis in academic publishing has reached a point where young scholars in many fields of the humanities may no longer be able to communicate their research in the time-honoured manner – that is, in the form of a traditional codex printed by a university press. Sooner or later, most monographs will probably have to be published on the Internet. What form will they take? Atentative answer to that question is provided by a sketch for an electronic book about publishing and the book trade in 18th-century France.