Conversations on Expanded Publishing

We publish more yet read less. We skim through titles and headlines, scroll through stories and speak 140 characters at a time. Yet we also print, on-demand or in bulk, we decorate coffee tables, collect, beach read, we publish ourselves reading.

With the advent of personal computers and the internet in the 1990s, the promise of a rich multimedia reading experience was born. A world of possibilities opened: moving images in books, 3D reading environments, interactive storytelling, and many more innovations seemed to be within reach. But three decades later, we still read scanned PDFs from the traditional book. Publishing houses focus exclusively on print and occasional ePubs, and big tech platforms monopolise distribution. In the meantime, the market is getting more challenging as the attention economy reshapes readership and literacy, and Generative Artificial Intelligence is starting to occupy the positions of writers and editors. Where did the promised boom of multimedia books — and, with it, the advent of a new reading culture — go wrong? And most importantly, how do we deal with the fragmented environment we are publishing ourselves into?

Expanded publishing encompasses a set of practices, tools, workflows, business models, and approaches to editorial objects. It is not only a way of doing but also a way of seeing. It involves seeing the book as an expandable object—transcending the traditional linear conception of it, whether in print or as text on a screen. It also entails seeing the environment and culture in which the book exists as a space to inhabit with its content, expanding the editorial and curatorial processes at every stage: writing, production, distribution, promotion, fruition, reading, and collecting.

Sometimes referred to as self-reflective, extended, hybrid, experimental, or urgent publishing, this practice develops alternative methods (technological and social) and formats alongside traditional ones. The result is a dynamic, creative, multi-medium, and accessible process and output. Examples of expanded forms include video essays, interactive comic books, podcasts, real-time event reports, live virtual exhibitions, collaborative digital archives spanning past, present, and future, and as-yet undefined formats.

When put through the “expanded publishing machine”, the book becomes a container able to hold and shape content in manifold ways, a shapeshifting nomadic object traveling towards its readers, listeners, viewers, meeting them where they are.

This Toolkit is a research collection expanding on the infrastructures, politics, and networks of publishing, as seen by practitioners we relate to, align with, and admire — a series of expandable conversations, in the hopes of understanding and building what expanded publishing is and can be.