diff --git a/MANIFEST.in b/MANIFEST.in
index 0bad7a6c..33b31140 100644
--- a/MANIFEST.in
+++ b/MANIFEST.in
@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
 include LICENSE
+include README.rst
+include requirements*.txt
 graft html5lib/tests/testdata
 recursive-include html5lib/tests *.py
diff --git a/README b/README
deleted file mode 100644
index 12a48f30..00000000
--- a/README
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,39 +0,0 @@
-html5lib is a pure-python library for parsing HTML. It is designed to
-conform to the HTML 5 specification, which has formalized the error handling
-algorithms of popular web browsers.
-
- = Installation =
-
-html5lib is packaged with distutils. To install it use:
- $ python setup.py install
-
- = Tests =
-
-You may wish to check that your installation has been a success by
-running the testsuite. All the tests can be run by invoking
-runtests.py in the html5lib/tests/ directory
-
- = Usage =
-
-Simple usage follows this pattern:
-
-import html5lib
-f = open("mydocument.html")
-parser = html5lib.HTMLParser()
-document = parser.parse(f)
-
-
-More documentation is avaliable in the docstrings or from
-http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/wiki/UserDocumentation
-
- = Bugs =
-
-Please report any bugs on the issue tracker:
-http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/issues/list
-
- = Get Involved =
-
-Contributions to code or documenation are actively encouraged. Submit
-patches to the issue tracker or discuss changes on irc in the #whatwg
-channel on freenode.net
-
diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..1c25df37
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@
+html5lib
+========
+
+html5lib is a pure-python library for parsing HTML. It is designed to
+conform to the HTML specification, as is implemented by all major web
+browsers.
+
+
+Requirements
+------------
+
+Python 2.6 and above as well as Python 3.0 and above are
+supported. Implementations known to work are CPython (as the reference
+implementation) and PyPy. Jython is known *not* to work due to various
+bugs in its implementation of the language. Others such as IronPython
+may or may not work; if you wish to try, you are strongly encouraged
+to run the testsuite and report back!
+
+The only required library dependency is ``six``, this can be found
+packaged in PyPi.
+
+Optionally:
+
+- ``datrie`` can be used to improve parsing performance (though in
+  almost all cases the improvement is marginal);
+
+- ``lxml`` is supported as a tree format (for both building and
+  walking) under CPython (but *not* PyPy where it is known to cause
+  segfaults);
+
+- ``genshi`` has a treewalker (but not builder); and
+
+- ``chardet`` can be used as a fallback when character encoding cannot
+  be determined (note currently this is only packaged on PyPi for
+  Python 2, though several package managers include unofficial ports
+  to Python 3).
+
+
+Installation
+------------
+
+html5lib is packaged with distutils. To install it use::
+
+  $ python setup.py install
+
+
+Usage
+-----
+
+Simple usage follows this pattern::
+
+  import html5lib
+  with open("mydocument.html", "r") as fp:
+      document = html5lib.parse(f)
+
+or::
+
+  import html5lib
+  document = html5lib.parse("<p>Hello World!")
+
+More documentation is available in the docstrings.
+
+
+Bugs
+----
+
+Please report any bugs on the `issue tracker
+<https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-python/issues>`_.
+
+
+Tests
+-----
+
+These are contained in the html5lib-tests repository and included as a
+submodule, thus for git checkouts they must be initialized (for
+release tarballs this is unneeded)::
+
+  $ git submodule init
+  $ git submodule update
+
+And then they can be run, with ``nose`` installed, using the
+``nosetests`` command in the root directory. All should pass.
+
+
+Contributing
+------------
+
+Pull requests are more than welcome — both to the library and to the
+documentation. Some useful information:
+
+- We aim to follow PEP 8 in the library, but ignoring the
+  79-character-per-line limit, instead following a soft limit of 99,
+  but allowing lines over this where it is the readable thing to do.
+
+- We keep pyflakes reporting no errors or warnings at all times.
+
+- We keep the master branch passing all tests at all times on all
+  supported versions.
+
+Travis CI is run against all pull requests and should enforce all of
+the above.
+
+We also use an external code-review tool, which uses your GitHub login
+to authenticate. You'll get emails for changes on the review.
+
+
+Questions?
+----------
+
+There's a mailing list available for support on Google Groups,
+`html5lib-discuss <http://groups.google.com/group/html5lib-discuss>`_,
+though you may have more success (and get a far quicker response)
+asking on IRC in #whatwg on irc.freenode.net.