We publish books for the whole arc of a life.

A publishing house is a set of decisions about what deserves to exist. Ours are made one book at a time.

DALFAST Publishing is the publishing arm of DALFAST, s.r.o., based in Bratislava and reaching readers across Europe and beyond. We commission, edit, design and publish original work in digital editions. Everything on our list was made here — we are a publisher, not a marketplace, and nothing reaches a reader that an editor did not argue for first.

Our list is deliberately wide. On the same shelf you will find a picture book about a child learning to be brave and a study of what happens to identity when machines remember everything. That looks eccentric until you notice the through-line: both are written for someone at a particular moment of their life, and both are held to the same standard of care. A four-year-old deserves as much editorial attention as a chief executive.

How we work

Every book moves through the same process — reading, commission, structural edit, line edit, proof, design, production, publication. There is no fast lane and no shortcut for a title we happen to be excited about. It is slower than the alternative, and it is the entire reason a small list is worth building.

We publish in digital editions because that is how most people now read, not because it is cheaper. Every title is produced as a complete edition: a properly typeset PDF, an EPUB for e-readers, and cover artwork commissioned for the book rather than chosen from a library.

What you own

When you buy a book from us, it is yours. It sits in your library, it can be re-downloaded on any device for as long as you have an account, and we do not take it back, rent it to you, or ask you to buy it again in a new format. This is the oldest idea in publishing and it is worth restating, because digital has spent twenty years quietly eroding it.

We also think you should be able to read some of a book before paying for it, which is why titles carry a genuine sample rather than a table of contents.

On machines

We publish books about artificial intelligence, so we should be plain about our own use of it. We use machine assistance in production — the unglamorous work of formatting, checking and converting files. We do not use it to write, we do not use it to translate, and we do not use it to decide what is worth publishing. Those are the three decisions that make a publisher a publisher, and handing any of them to a machine would leave nothing behind worth the name.

The same principle governs translation. Our editions are translated by translators. A book pushed through a machine is not a foreign edition; it is the same book with the care removed.