The explosion of publications on the web, in combination with increasingly ubiquitous broadband networks, accessible from ever-more mobile computing platforms, leads us to consider how literature might serve as a collection of data to enable new services on the web. Publishing is becoming not merely a producer of short story collections, essays, and treatises, but an entry point into new opportunities for machine-enabled applications. Hypothetical examples discussed include the integration of online book repositories into wikipedia, and enabling the availability of all published non-fiction as a set of queryable-facts in any major world language.