2025-05-31T11:12:00Z for immediate release.
NGI TALER deliverable 3.2: TALER Bookseller demo promises to keep your reading list private.
You may read the deliverable report. (PDF)
NGI TALER
The NGI TALER project is funded as a pilot under the Next Generation Internet initiative within the European Commission’s Horizon Europe research funding program. It is operated by a consortium of 11 partners from 8 European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Switzerland and The Netherlands) with the mandate to roll out an innovative, best-in-class electronic payment system that benefits everyone: customers, merchants, banks, financial authorities, auditors and anti-corruption researchers! The project builds upon the strong foundations of GNU Taler — the privacy-preserving digital payment system developed by the GNU community and Taler Systems SA with support from the NGI initiative.
Read more on NGI TALER’s website.
NGI TALER Bookseller
Work Package 3, Verticals Towards Commercialization aims to investigate three vertical markets, in complement to WP2’s Finance vertical market:
- The Independent Book Sector (Independent Book Sector)
- Inclusion and e-Health (Social Inclusion and e-Health)
- The Free/Libre Open Source Software Supply Chain (Free Software Supply Chain)
The TALER Bookseller focuses on the first item and proposes that PS (@ps-editions), the publishing partner within the TALER consortium, sell their books online using GNU Taler. The deliverable report provides details of the implementation and access to the online shop running the system.
→ https://bookseller.taler.net/
Under Bolchevik rule, Russian citizens and people across the Eastern Bloc circulated books banned by the government under their coat; these and this peer-to-peer strategy to distribute printed texts were called samizdat (самиздат means self-publishing in Russian). In 2025, Big Brother utters post-truth English and issues biased lists of banned words that should not be used by the administration anymore: from abortion to women, the leaked list makes it hard if not impossible to relate to European values anymore; even peanut allergies made it to this list. 
Since books are a reliable source for such banned words, in a world dominated by reactionary billionaire fools, preserving the privacy of your book purchases can keep you safe. It may be useful to have a payment system that allows you to buy books without unwanted censors coming knocking at your door to take your new order for an autodafé. When 1984 meets Farenheit 451, only cash spent at your local bookshop remains your ally! Yet, both these books predate the internet[1] and contactless payment. Fortunately, with GNU Taler, you can have both the privacy of cash and the swiftness of contactless payments.
Learn more on GNU Taler and the NGI TALER consortium.
Independent Book Sector
If you’re an independent publisher, bookshop, or are interested in trying Taler payments for yourself, you’re welcome to join the conversation.
Try: https://ich.taler.net/invites/D4VMct7F1P
About petites singularités
PS is a non-profit association established in Brussels, a partner in the NGI TALER consortium, and lead on Work Package 3. The history of PS stems from free software activism and book making. Even before they incorporated their association, PS founders were active making books: they were instrumental in structuring Cost of Freedom (2015), in support for late Syrian Creative Commons activist Bassel Khartabil who, we learned later, died in Bashar Al Assad’s prisons the same year; they also ran a booksprint for software freedom, your way (2016) which documented the Debian fork and proposed an approach to a human and collective approach to free software that formed the core of petites singularités’ approach to a Third TechnoScape and software syndicalism.
From this experience, PS started producing books on a yearly basis since 2019, and started professionalizing this activity since 2021. Coming from free software and the GNU project, it was only natural for PS to embrace GNU Taler, a promising electronic payment system that was the only credible proposal from the free software community to counter dominant narratives competing to take control of online payment systems across the board. Besides being the only viable proposal coming from the free software community, GNU Taler offers unique characteristics that make it a serious contender against industrial giants in payment systems, at a fraction of the cost.
GNU Taler for the independent book sector
GNU Taler’s unique design brings, in PS opinion, four invaluable
advantages over competition:
- privacy of the buyer (good to uphold EU values);
- transparency of the seller (good for thwarting tax evasion and money laundering);
- free software (good for digital sovereignty and security);
- and much cheaper operational costs than existing solutions (good for long-term competition and keeping transaction costs low).
As an independent publisher in 2025, who needs to sell books online, and at events, GNU Taler provides a cost effective and ethical payment solution, and we’re looking forward to see it thriving on the European Single Market. Due to its much lower operational costs, GNU Taler is also perfectly suited to handle micro-payments, opening new opportunities for publishers, like selling e-books or single articles. This deliverable, for PS, was therefore a first practical step in exploring what we — professionals of the independent book sector — can do with GNU Taler.
Press Inquiry
See TALER ICH Press Inquiry — Information for journalists - TALER ICH.
1984 was published in 1949; Farenheit 451 was published in 1953. ↩︎