In May, Constant hosts Marcell Mars, Sebastian Luetgert and Jan Gerber in Constant Variable. They are in Brussels to work on tools and infrastructures that facilitate free access to (digital) books.

The Public Library is one of those vital institutions that we start to notice only once they go extinct. With the arrival of The Internet, it seemed just a matter of time before global personal computer distribution and access penetration would finally make knowledge accessible for anyone, anywhere. However, the actual development of Public Libraries points in the opposite direction. Public Libraries cannot receive, and sometimes not even buy digital books produced by some of the largest publishers. The copies they do have must be destroyed after lending them 26 times. Commercial players dominate the scanning and dissemination of books in electronic form; effectively relinquishing the dream of free access to human knowledge. More info: http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/public-library

On 16 and 17 May, we invite graphic designers, hackers, interface-designers, librarians, independent bookpublishers, webdevelopers and programmers with skills and/or ideas related to DIY-printed matter, e-books, OCR, peer-to-peer libraries etc. to join us for a two-day hacksession and make The Public Library a reality!

List of participants (please add yourself): http://note.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/1116