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↳ Manifesting .expub

Manifesting Expanded Publishing

By Tommaso Campagna, Marta Ceccarelli, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Geert Lovink and Carolina Valente Pinto

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, and publish pictures of 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 within reach. The revolution of the book would inaugurate a new reading culture.

But three decades later, we still read low-quality scans of print books in PDF format. The legacy publishing industry is ‘consolidated’ (read: stuck) as big publishing conglomerates focus exclusively on print and occasional ePubs. A seemingly endless cycle of crises, from COVID-19 to climate collapse, and from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the global rise of authoritarianism, is disrupting the supply chain, driving up prices of paper (and therefore books), hindering distribution across borders, and generally laying bear the fragility of the legacy publishing industry. In the meantime, the market is getting more challenging as the attention economy reshapes readership and literacy - the only ‘disruption’ of the publishing industry over the past decades. Big tech platforms have increasingly monopolised the distribution of retail, second-hand books, audiobooks, and ePubs. Not to mention, generative Artificial Intelligence started to take over 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? How do we deal with the fragmented environment we are publishing ourselves into? The singular focus on profit and power maximization of tech enterprises has become overwhelmingly clear in the past decades. So has the incapacity of the legacy publishing industry to respond to the hostile takeover. Today, the only real space of agency and alternatives can be found among DIY initiatives, loose collectives, renegade programmers, underpaid artwriters, small presses, local bookshops, and geeks with riso printers - in short, in cultural publishing. But is it even remotely realistic to expect a disorganized network of cultural practitioners to organize a new reading culture, in the face of big tech power?

Cultural Publishing Obstacles

There is no lack of urgency. If anything, the stack of crises has increased the need for local, networked, sustainable infrastructures, community practices, small-scale circulation, and print-on-demand services. There is no lack of tools either. We have the tech solutions to support embedded video, dynamic annotations, versioning, spatial authorship, live publishing, web scraping, automated web-to-print publishing, non-linear and interactive formats, and much more. However, these remain niche, underdeveloped, unstable, or siloed. The major underlying obstacles that prevent these practices from taking off on a larger scale are threefold.

First, there is no mass public and, therefore, little to no sustainably functional business model for experimental cultural publishing. Silicon Valley venture capital-driven hypergrowth is the only model to scale up. However much we value the cultural merit of video-in-books, people just don’t buy it. Second, whether they include riso print, experimental binding, or live annotation, experimental publications are costly and labour-intensive. Especially given the already precarious economic cycles of the often small cultural publishing houses and initiatives, taking on more workload to experiment can be a tall order. Third, mainstream publishing has a tendency towards cultural marginalisation and self-marginalisation. To recognize other formats is to recognize other knowledge. To legitimize multimedia publishing is to legitimize different rhythms, aesthetics, and publics. Mainstream publishing is unwilling to commit to this recognition. The “multimedia turn” in publishing is decades old—ignored not because it is new, but because its implications are radical. In reaction, those involved in experimental cultural publishing often embrace this marginalisation, creating illegible one-off publications in a tiny edition, developing the most unstable of software usable for insiders only, insisting on reinventing the wheel continuously, and speaking with contempt about the general public. To be marginal is to be real, allegedly.

Finding or, more likely, developing robust alternative infrastructures for multimedia and transmedia publishing will not be easy, having to take on all of these problems, simultaneously, but, as we have observed before, it is our one point of hope. On the bright side, many exciting experiments are happening as we write (and as you read). In the recent post-Covid years, we have especially noticed a latent breakthrough in the areas of liveness and the moving image. The question of how to integrate video in books has always hovered over the history of the unbound book, but has never really come to a serious culmination. Until recently. The 2020-2023 isolation and sheer amount of online cultural programs, and the question of what to do with this content, seems to have set a new tendency in motion, or at least propelled it to much greater reach. This book you are currently holding (physically or digitally) is dedicated to this new tendency.

What is Expanded Publishing?

Publishing has long been treated as a terminal act. An endpoint. The moment when ideas are stabilized and sealed, bound and distributed, finalized and fixed. But what if we start from a different premise? What if publishing is not the last gesture, but the very medium through which thinking, making, and sharing unfold? What if the book, its formats, protocols, and temporalities, is not a form to be merely filled, but a space of continuous negotiation and invention?

Expanded publishing is not yet another genre, format, or technological upgrade. It is an evolving field of hybrid practices, tools, workflows, business models, and approaches to editorial objects. Expanded publishing is also a critical lens to how, for whom, and with what tools and politics this is done. It emerges from the crises of traditional publishing and the exhaustion of innovation cycles in the digital realm.

Expanded publishing 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, producing, launching, sharing, designing, distributing, promoting, fruiting, reading, collecting, and critiquing.

Borrowing the term “expanded” from the 1970s expanded cinema, which sought to break film loose from the screen and reframe it as an event, an environment, a situation, we see expanded publishing as a way to dislodge publishing from the paper book, the PDF or ePub, the conference proceedings, or even the funding reports. Instead, it shows that publishing can involve a mix of approaches, acting as a hybrid tool, a medium, and a setting that changes depending on the time, place, and people involved.

Sometimes referred to as self-reflective, extended, hybrid, experimental, or urgent publishing, this practice develops alternative methods (technological, economic, and social) and formats alongside traditional ones. The term expanded publication was introduced by Loraine Furter and strongly resonates with this tradition. In 2014, she wrote:

“If during hundreds of years in our Western print culture the notion of “publishing” was mainly understood as “paper book”, today things are becoming moving and more diverse. Along with today’s great technological (r)evolutions comes an expanded conception of publication, where publishing’s common denominator would be making things public, in its wider sense.” Loraine Furter. “An expanded essay for Open Books (second edition)”, lorainefurter.net, 2014, https://www.lorainefurter.net/projects/expanded/expanded.html.

The result is a dynamic, creative, multi-medium, and accessible process and output. Examples of expanded forms include video essays, podcast series, live collaborative documents, stream-based publishing, zines, distributed archives, pop-up bookshops, fediverse-native works, and processual tools that treat publishing not as output, but as continuous rehearsal, annotation, contradiction, translation. It does not simply seek to enhance publishing with multimedia, but to ask what happens when we start from liveness, from networks, from situated infrastructures, from collective authorship and broken links.

This is not a nostalgic return to the digital optimism of the early 2000s. The promises of interactivity, mutability, and multiplicity have been largely subsumed by platform capitalism and speculative tech. 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.

Towards a Publishing Commons

The materials and tools for expanded publishing already exist, scattered across federated social networks, annotation tools, small-scale print collectives, web-to-print tools, and self-hosted servers. Expanded publishing is clearly positioned within the platform economy, developing practices that escape or undermine the hegemonic apparatuses. They often avoid YouTube, InDesign, Google Docs, Amazon, Twitter, and the traditional publishing industry. Instead, they work with alternative, decentralised, autonomous technology. The challenge is not invention but alignment; connecting these fragments into a shared infrastructure that fosters interoperability, sustainability, and mutual legitimacy.

In other words, we do not want to build yet another platform or propose a single protocol. Rather, we aim to cultivate a network we call publishing commons: a landscape of shared principles, community governance, interoperable tools, mutual visibility, infrastructural care, and cyclical regeneration outside of the market. In this view, publishing is not a service or product but a mode of social and technical assembly.

This commons resists centralization and corporate enclosure, privileging instead federated, community-run repositories and open protocols. It recognizes the often invisible labor behind publishing, server logs, metadata, editing, and distributing, and makes it visible. Expanded publishing is thus a form of institutional practice, building institutions of the common - not through consolidation but through precarious, decentralized, and collective acts.

Invitation to Join the Networks of Practice

The book we speak from manifests a practice to come. It is an ode to expanded publishing. An open invitation to reflect, confront, experiment, and reshape. A contribution to a growing field. A repository of documentation and proposals. A promise of collaboration on shared infrastructures and federated publications. We ask you, as one expanded publisher to another:

What are the key components in defining expanded publishing?
What are the main urgencies to develop expanded publishing?
Can you name a few exemplary, inspiring expanded publications or publishing practices?
How does ‘expanded publishing’ diverge from or overlap with digital publishing, post-digital publishing, enhanced publishing, and experimental publishing? Are we talking about a historical difference (e.g. the newest chapter in the history of the unbound book), a qualitative difference (e.g. bringing in moving image), or just a new vibe?
Are the long-standing promises of (post-)digital publishing (liveness, mutability, multivoicedness, interactivity, etc.) still important to expanded publishing?
Are any formats prevalent in expanded publishing (e.g. zines, radio, stream art)? If so, why?
To what extent can categories of disciplines help us understand expanded publishing, even if in the negative, in case expanded publishing is an active deconstruction/oversaturation of disciplines?
Same question, but now for medium.
How does expanded publishing deal with ‘global distribution’ and other Amazon promises?
What can you say about expanded publishing and/in the fediverse?
What is the position of expanded publishing in the market? How does expanded publishing relate to the stagnated traditional publishing industry? Is it part of the creative industries? And how does it relate to the platform economy/webshops, PoD & audiobook platforms?
Can we understand expanded publishing as a form of critique or as a collective strategy?
Is expanded publishing an attempt to overcome project-logics, prototypism, precarity, the ecological limits of printing, faltering postal services, censorship, unstable internet connections, and other problems of access, or an attempt to sit with these issues and make them interesting?
What are the demands of expanded publishing towards (public) institutions? Do we ask for community publishing facilities, long-term tool maintenance, decentralized repositories, and accessible publication series?
Conversely, how do public interests shape expanded publishing as a critical form of instituent practice?
Is expanded publishing your next political project? Abolish dominant publishing.

At this link, you can find a public file where you can provide input, suggestions, questions, etc. The online version of this publication on expandedpublishing.com will be kept updated with new content in the future. You can also send us your comments or contributions by email info@networkcultures.org (The document will be moderated to the extent of our capacity. If you come across content that you find inappropriate, please let us know at info@networkcultures.org.)