.expub | Exploring Expanded Publishing
**Introduction
This book is the outcome of the two-year research project .expub | Exploring Expanded Publishing. The project brought together four institutions and publishing initiatives from across Europe: the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), Aksioma (Ljubljana), Echo Chamber (Brussels), and Nero Editions (Rome).
United by a shared curiosity and critical stance toward emergent publishing practices, we set out not to define expanded publishing from above, but to experiment with it in practice, to critically engage with it.
Over the two years, this led us to ongoing reflection and dialogue about both the context and practical applications of expanded publishing. We explored this through a broad spectrum of formats: publications, public events, interviews, conferences, video essays, comic books, podcasts, and live streams. These weren’t standalone outputs but entangled and co-produced efforts between the consortium partners and a wide variety of authors, artists, and researchers. This collaborative methodology was central to our approach.
Rather than simply documenting our work, this book aims to focus on one of the key objectives of the project: coming closer to a working, shared understanding of what expanded publishing is — and could become.
This effort is reflected in the first chapter of this book, manifesting expanded publishing. This text serves both as a summary of our collective position and a provocation for further thought. But we also wanted to move beyond statements, toward a deeper investigation of the infrastructures, politics, and economies that shape experimental publishing today.
Thus, this book is itself a publishing experiment. It was written and edited using Etherport — a tool developed by Open Source Publishing that connects collaborative writing pads (Etherpad) to a live, dual-format publishing system. This setup allowed us to work simultaneously on both a web and print version of the book while writing and editing together in real time. This method enabled not only co-authorship and versioning, but also made the book modular and open-ended by design. Videos, hyperlinks, and other non-print elements are included in the online version, and future iterations of the book are possible within this framework.
The final structure of the book reflects this modular thinking. It brings together two distinct but interrelated parts: essays and conversations on expanded publishing.
The second section, Conversations on Expanded Publishing, was published online earlier in 2025 as a standalone volume curated by Marta Ceccarelli and Carolina Valente Pinto. It features nine interviews conducted by the project consortium in July 2024 at NERO Editions in Rome. These conversations involved a diverse group of experts in experimental publishing — including artists, authors, publishers, researchers, coders, and designers — each bringing their personal perspective to the debate: Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Thomas Spies, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Gijs de Heij, Yancey Strickler, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Dušan Barok.
The first section — newly added in this current edition — consists of commissioned essays, or ones developed during the project, by authors whose work we closely follow and whose perspectives we sought to engage: Ezequiel Soriano, Annette Gilbert, Jordi Viader Guerrero, and Ilan Manouach. These texts, developed in response to the conversations, provide a wider theoretical and practical framework for engaging with the topic. They do not attempt to define expanded publishing, but rather expand on its questions: How can publishing move across media, formats, and contexts? What kind of infrastructures does it require? What kinds of politics does it enact — or resist?
We chose to place the essays before the interviews, reversing the chronological order of their production. Though the essays were written later, they frame the dialogues that follow, offering a broader lens through which to read them. In doing so, this edition aims not to finalize a narrative, but to keep it open — as both a reference point and a living document of a collective research process still in motion.
Just like the subject it investigates, this project remains open, iterative, and expandable. What you’re holding in your hands (or scrolling through on your screen) is one possible form the project has taken — a snapshot of an evolving process. From mediated speech via video calls to collaborative notes on Etherport, from hyperlinked texts to printable formats, the tools and infrastructures we used were themselves part of the exploration.
Finally, the book closes with a timeline of the many events we organized throughout these two years — a record of our shared movement across formats, geographies, and disciplines.
We invite you to read, use, and expand this work in your own way.