In 2013, north London-based publisher Zed Books released The Global Minotaur as part of its Economic Controversies series. The book detailed the deep history of the eurozone and global economic crises, and traced their roots all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929 and the restructuring of global finance in the 1970s. Its Greek author used the figure of the Cretan minotaur, fed on an endless stream of Athenian youth sent as tribute, as a model for the way Europe and the rest of the world had increasingly poured its capital into Wall Street, giving it the financial muscle to explode in the 80s – and drag everyone down in the 00s.

At the beginning of 2015, that author, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, leapt into public view when he was appointed as Greek finance minister under the newly elected Syriza government, with the responsibility for renegotiating Greece’s financial relationship with the EU. Within only a few days, Zed released a free ebook, Europe After the Minotaur, an updated extract from the earlier book covering the central points of Varoufakis’s thinking and strategy for restructuring European finance, just as Varoufakis himself started to put them into practice, under huge media scrutiny.

The speed with which Zed was able to respond to global events was made possible by electronic publishing, but its implementation owed as much to Zed’s unique structure and aims. Zed is a collective, owned and run by all of its employees, who receive equal pay, and “collective decision-making means departmental decisions can be made while easily utilising the expertise of people in different departments”. Zed’s structure is political, and supports its political aims: to widen access to, and engagement with, contemporary politics and economics. As in the case of Europe After the Minotaur, digital projects can be fast-tracked through the company structure, using digital technology to make an impact that goes beyond just changing the way we read.