xenobooks is a proposal by Laurent de Sutter and Ilan Manouach for a confederated publishing network at the level of Europe. It diagnoses the European book industry — particularly in theory and the human sciences — as facing not only a crisis of readership but an infrastructural one: rising printing, distribution, translation, and communication costs; asymmetrical national funding; and the steady displacement of European voices by commercially safer Anglo-American ones. xenobooks argues that the consequence is not just market concentration but a monoculture of ideas, and a weakening of the European public sphere itself.

In response, the project proposes four lines of confederated action. Multilateral translation, in which presses in different national markets co-publish a shared catalogue, with machine-learning tools lowering the cost of translating non-fiction into less-represented languages. Shared printing, pooling resources at the large Eastern European facilities so that small presses can print at scale without committing to runs they cannot sell. A common catalogue and joint communication, releasing books simultaneously across multiple languages and accompanying them with shared events, debates, and tours. And a re:europe orientation: a multilingual, de-localised, federated logic of publishing intended to restore pluralism within Europe and strengthen its position relative to other global markets.