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Drummond Moir of Wm Heinemann has acquired a book on online whistleblowers by Heather Brooke, the journalist and campaigner who first exposed the MPs expenses scandal.
Moir bought UK and Commonwealth rights in The Revolution Will Be Digitised from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown.
The book will look behind the scenes of websites such as Wikileaks, prominent this week after the mass leak of military documents on the war in Afghanistan, and will explore the world of computer hackers, internet whistleblowers and pro-democracy campaigners.
The publisher said it would argue that we’re at "an extraordinary moment in human history", as "never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation."
However a powerful backlash is also challenging the new data frontier. Moir said the book would be "a groundbreaking investigation into how the internet is transforming politics, by an absolutely iconic journalist who knows better than anyone what it means to shake up the establishment."
Brooke explained: "It was clear to me from my own reporting and campaigning around freedom of information that society is undergoing a radical transformation. The amount of knowledge in the world is now so vast and technology so adept at zero-cost duplication that no government, company or organisation can hope to keep control.
"When I met Julian Assange of Wikileaks he was still a little-known figure but his stories of battles
fought to free information and ambitions to free even more in future spurred me to begin writing this book."
The Revolution Will be Digitised will be published in 2012.