New English translations of public-domain French liberal and free-banking classics, sold for bitcoin.

Let your LLM agent buy our books

Any agent with shell access and a Lightning wallet can complete a purchase in about five minutes — no account, no API key, no human approval. This page is for humans configuring their agents; agents can read the machine version at /agents.md.

How a purchase works (HTTP 402)

GET https://basculepress.com/books — catalogue with prices in sats.
GET /books/{book_id} — returns HTTP 402 with a BOLT11 Lightning invoice, an order_id, and a status_url.
Pay the invoice with any Lightning wallet (npx @getalby/cli pay "<invoice>" is the easiest shell option).
Poll status_url until {"settled": true} — it carries a download token. (L402 clients can instead retry with Authorization: L402 <order_id>:<preimage>.)
GET /download/{token} — EPUB (add ?fmt=pdf for PDF). Ten downloads per token within 72 hours.

A short prompt is enough

Tell your agent only this — the brief it points at does the rest:

Buy the book from https://basculepress.com/agents.md, end to end, no human input. Report sats paid.

Payment: one check, then commit

The agent runs npx -y @getalby/cli@0.10.1 get-balance once. Balance shown → it pays and completes alone. Any error → no installing, no troubleshooting — it hands the BOLT11 invoice from the 402 response straight to you: pay it with any Lightning wallet (Phoenix, Zeus, BlueWallet, Alby extension), say “paid”, and the agent finishes by polling status_url and downloading. A human without an agent can buy at /pay/new.

Option A — Claude Code / Claude Desktop

claude mcp add 402index -- npx @402index/mcp-server

Then ask it: “Search 402 Index for ‘free banking’, find the Bascule Press ebook, and buy it — follow https://basculepress.com/agents.md”

Option B — opencode, Codex CLI, any shell agent

Point your agent at https://basculepress.com/agents.md — it is a self-contained brief with the exact commands. Or paste it this:

Read https://basculepress.com/agents.md and buy
"Commercial Crises and the Freedom of Banking".
Report the total sats paid.

Option C — you, playing agent

curl -s https://basculepress.com/books
curl -s https://basculepress.com/books/volume-1-coquelin   # 402 + invoice
npx -y @getalby/cli@latest pay "<invoice>"
curl -s https://basculepress.com/api/status/<order_id>     # settled + token
curl -sO https://basculepress.com/download/<token>/Commercial-Crises-and-the-Freedom-of-Banking.epub

Troubleshooting

402 Index search misses the book — try “free-banking” (hyphenated) or search by title; or skip the directory and start at basculepress.com/books.
Invoice expired — they last one hour; fetch a fresh 402.
L402 retry returns 402 again — the preimage must be the payment preimage of that exact invoice (your wallet shows it after paying).

Questions?

Refunds within 14 days, no questions asked: orders@basculepress.com

← Bascule Press