About
Structure is the only promise worth making.
Anybody can say they will put authors first. The question is what happens on the day that costs them money. GroundSpring Publishing is built as a not-for-profit, inside a foundation whose mission is locked, because that is a promise you cannot quietly break later.
GroundSpring Publishing
A groundspring is water that has travelled a long way underground, under its own pressure, and reaches daylight because the rock finally gives. It does not need a pump. It needs the ground to move.
We are a publisher in the sense that we do the publishing — the editing, the typesetting, the covers, the formats, the metadata, the distribution — and not in the sense that we own anything. We acquire no rights. We take no percentage. We do not decide whether your book deserves to exist. Our entire function is to remove the part of publishing that money used to buy, so that the part that talent buys is the only part left that matters.
Everything we publish is free to read on the web, permanently, in addition to whatever editions the author chooses to sell.
The Webspinner Foundation
GroundSpring is a project of the Webspinner Foundation, a not-for-profit whose purpose is to democratise the infrastructure of artificial intelligence through radical simplicity — so that every person can build remarkable things without technical barriers or corporate intermediaries standing in the way.
The Foundation's other work runs along the same line. Webspinner University publishes an open curriculum in AI literacy with no paywalls and no gatekeeping. United AI Workers organises on behalf of knowledge workers living through the disruption. GroundSpring applies the same argument to books: the tools are here, the cost has collapsed, and what remains is a distribution of access that nobody chose and nobody defends out loud.
Governance has to be structural, not voluntary. The Foundation’s founding doctrine
That sentence is why the Foundation is a 501(c)(3) inside a purpose trust with a council holding binding authority over the mission, rather than a company with good intentions. A company that takes a share of your book acquires a fiduciary reason to prefer books that sell. We removed the reason rather than promising to resist it.
John David Marx
GroundSpring was founded by John David Marx, who also founded the Webspinner Foundation.
He taught himself to program at sixteen on a Burroughs B-1900, and took his first professional job on the night shift at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas — where he found the thing that has organised his career since, which is that technology is worth building when it serves people. He studied technology and philosophy at TCU, and founded his first company, PC Company, in 1986, before finishing.
He then designed CGL, a fourth-generation language that generated C applications for Unix, and built Open Systems Group on top of it. In 1996 Open Systems Group reached number 127 on the Inc. 500 with more than six million dollars in annual revenue. He spun out Para-Docs Software, an early document-management platform, on the observation that the enterprise knowledge problem was only going to get larger — which it did.
From 2012 to 2017 he was at Red Hat, ending as business development director for financial services, helping global banks adopt OpenShift and the working practices that came with it. In 2024 he founded Webspinner, a local-first platform he describes as “AI for everyone, not just developers”, along with the Webspinner Foundation and United AI Workers, a labour organisation registered with the Department of Labor to represent knowledge workers in the AI era.
The thread through forty years of it is the same one that produced this publisher: the conviction that the tools should belong to the people doing the work, and that an intermediary who is not earning their position should be removed rather than negotiated with.
More at johndavidmarx.com.
What we will not do
- We will not charge a reading fee, a submission fee, a setup fee or a package price.
- We will not acquire rights in your work, exclusive or otherwise.
- We will not place ourselves between you and your royalties.
- We will not sell, rent or share your contact details. Ever, to anyone.
- We will not publish a book that is not yours, and we will not use anyone’s manuscript to train anything.
- We will not claim a machine can tell you whether your book is good.