label

alternative publishing practices

Linked to 34 items

from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

The result is a dynamic, creative, multi-medium, and accessible process and output. alternative publishing practicesExamples 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.
from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

It was not the perfection of digital printing technology that made print on demand (POD) a success, but a radical rethinking of the printing business and a complete reorganization of all related workflows. After all, it was no longer a matter of printing a single title in a large print run and then delivering the product on pallets to a single customer address, but of printing and shipping a large number of different titles, with only one copy of each title in extreme cases (which were to become the rule). This “profoundly disruptive” change has been compared to the transition from Fordism to Toyotism in the post-war period.² But it was not until around 2005 that the POD model gained truly revolutionary momentum with the establishment of POD service providers such as toolsBlurb and Lulu, which focused primarily on the mass market and the end consumer, especially first-time authors. As a result, alternative publishing practicesordinary people with no knowledge of design, printing, or bookselling can now create, publish, print, promote, and distribute their works — not only in the POD provider’s own online store, but also, if they want and once they acquire an ISBN, worldwide in brick-and-mortar and online bookstores to which such POD service providers are connected via Ingram and Amazon.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

47:30 The position of Clusterduck towards cryptocurrencies is very attentive and critical, because financial streamswe saw what happened during COVID with the NFT craze in relationship to our network of digital artists, and it was very ambiguous. So we were watching it happening, and it was destroying the vision that people have about digital art because, for us, digital art is much more than a JPEG sold on a digital Metaverse or whatever platform/museum. The Superinternet World Experience has something in common with Clusterduck and also with an interesting work from Silvio Lorusso, “A Slice of the Pie”. It was a project that we really liked. They were using a cake and everybody could try to join in the building just by posting their art on this cake. And what was happening is that if you managed to post on the cake, you could write on your CV that you exhibited at Kunsthalle, we love that. Super Internet Space does something in that direction in the sense that crypto as a technology makes it easier to assign a room to the artist that joins the project. And so to answer your question, Lorenzo, maybe it is useful to make the process easier. About the CV, we particularly loved that thing and we use that in the Meme Manifesto project as well. alternative publishing practicesThis year we were exhibiting at KW Institute in Berlin, and we asked the curator to write a very huge colophon of 300 names so that all the people who joined the project could write on their CV that they were exhibiting at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, which is the “higher” place in we got in. If we can use any tool, script, we try to give back something to the community that we are interacting with.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

1:19:17 What I wanted to add is that in the past, with books like “House of Leaves” or I remember a project by Katherine Hayles, which was about electronic literature… There were many attempts of making a book something which is not only a book. I remember Geert Lovink telling me that alternative publishing practicespublishing should be fast so that you can be in the conversation while the conversation is happening. You are already doing this. You’re exploring the power of the book as a printed medium, but doing it in a fast way and using the feedback that you can create with social media communities. I think this is working somehow.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 09:03 I wouldn’t say I’m exiting, but more operating on the edges, sort of trying to dip in and out of academic conventions where and when possible. A good example of that is the ongoing collaboration with Transmediale and Aarhus University. As I said, I have this adjunct position, and we’ve been running a research workshop for the last 12 years, which is derived from an open call. alternative publishing practicesWe select a group of researchers, often PhD students, but not necessarily, and they produce texts online and comment upon each other’s texts. Then we meet up in physical space, and we work on a sprint publication, which is expressed as a newspaper, but it’s not necessarily the kind of conventional form of a newspaper. We produce it very quickly. We write together in a collective space, and increasingly we’ve used experimental publishing techniques for this, such as web2print. A couple of times we did this with Gijs, from Open Source Publishing, but more recently with people from Varia collective, specifically Manetta Berends and Simon Browne. So we are increasingly trying to bring the process of publishing and writing much closer together, in dialogue, even in the same space.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. Two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like. In the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that the entire infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. Two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like. In the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that the entire infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. Two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like. In the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that the entire infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 38:45 digital objectsMy interest in that is more conceptual. ServPub is an attempt to think through what autonomous publishing might look like. Our speculation following a book that Winnie and I did together called Aesthetic Programming, which was published by Open Humanities Press. alternative publishing practicesWe released all the materials, all the writing on GitLab with the invitation that you could do anything you wanted with the contents of this book. You could add a chapter, you could rewrite it, you could fork it essentially. Some people took up that invitation. We’re really interested in that as a model of academic publishing, where you just produce an iteration of a book and someone could then make their own.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Ilan 42:19 Do you have any examples of federalizing structures of publishers? Minor composition is a great example. Many publishers in different countries publish in English, for better or for worse. We are wondering why we don’t have one single process of production. And then multiple distribution schemes, such as models combined together. This is something that was also developed by Geert at INC, but more as an idea than practice. This might be a really great solution for some books: the model is to use the publishers as distributors, as institutions that have access to specific audiences, using them as a sort of super-organism that will manage all the production processes and distribution of the books. alternative publishing practicesThis concerns comics too. Just to give an illustration here, I’m based in Brussels, comics are a very important cultural product, there are lots of fans. When we do books, we know that we are very limited in distribution, so we take the money from Belgium, and we try to find other publishers in different European countries. We see a book as sort of a shareholding thing, so they pre-buy 100, 200, 300 copies with a marginal cost that will never allow them to have a book like that in the catalog. It’s like a Robin Hood model, maybe slightly unrelated to the forms of publishing we're discussing here, but it would nonetheless be interesting to see more of this in non-fiction and academic writing.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 48:16 printed objectsThis is exactly what we tried to do with the Aesthetic Programming book, to think of the book as a computational object and to think of the printed form is one iteration of many possible versions that could be produced by multiple people. alternative publishing practicesAlso the reason I tend to work collaboratively and write collaboratively is because I want to remove myself as much as possible from these 19th century models and reputational economies that are so prevalent in publishing. You know, try and develop collective names, for instance, for these kinds of things. That’s the idea of the ServPub collective as well.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 13:44 So, at the moment, we mostly have a browser-based practice in the sense that we use HTML and CSS as layout tools. alternative publishing practicesThen the output can be both online as a website, and can also be printed as a PDF. We also have tools that generate HTML, so the more server-side tool is mostly Python at the moment. When we go towards print, what we do is, essentially, print a website, so it generates a PDF, and then often this PDF needs to be transformed. So it’s a toolkit of PDF tools. You have PDF2K, which allows you to take out pages and to combine PDFs. We use GoScript to manipulate the colour space, we also sometimes have new tools to manipulate, like crow boxes, but that’s very technical.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 40:28 governance and ownershipI think there’s federation in two ways. I guess the first form of federation is not exactly federation, but it’s about a tool being used by other people or institutes; and its usage creates a demand, but also creates the energy for this tool to be supported and maintained, to make sure that it keeps on working over time. Then I feel like open source is an answer to this tool — the code being distributed and allowing other people to download the new version of the code and use it. The idea of federation, where servers exchange or copy over material from each other, is a little bit out of reach for me. Software is extremely fragile, especially if you run server-side software because it means that somewhere there needs to be a computer that is continuously executing this code, it’s being maintained and it’s being kept safe. What I think is interesting about a tool like Paged.js is that it’s client-side, it’s written in JavaScript and is an extremely stable platform, with a lot of care of backwards compatibility, which in this case would mean that old JavaScript still works on contemporary browsers. The combination of HTML and JavaScript is quite stable, but also to us, sustainability, or maintainability, is important, and I think that there is a third element there which I would say is archivability. Archivability meaning, from the beggining thinking about in which states the project will be and what would this object look like in an archived form. alternative publishing practicesThis means having a hybrid publication, or a publication that can have multiple forms, both a website and maybe a printed output. You could decide that you only keep the printed output and keep the PDF and keep that as a sort of file. That is sustainable. It can also be that you freeze your website in the sense that it doesn’t depend on server-side software anymore, but that it’s only HTML files that are rendered, and they’re only static files. Then your website is much easier to archive in the sense that you can copy the HTML files. It includes the images, the scripts and the media files, and you can essentially put them on a zip drive or make a copy on a cloud somewhere, or an existing backup service. Currently, the answer is to make it sustainable by accepting that the object in its software form is unstable, and you need to think about how you can make archivable, relatively stable objects out of it.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Carolina 54:52 alternative publishing practicesThis conversation is sort of reminding me of something that came up today. To link different conversations, we were talking to Irene de Craen and she mentioned just stopping publishing, and then we talked to Geoff Cox, who was more along the lines of thinking about poor publishing and creating shorter connections between the elements of publishing that sometimes come with more mistakes. So I’m wondering if you feel like this type of work is also doing that; I don’t know if poor is the right term, because there is (at least in my head) the vision of these kinds of tools as quite functional and less messy, at least in the user side of things. How do you see this fitting into this idea of reducing the connections between publishing elements? Geoff mentioned several projects in which the work of the writer, the editor, and the designer are a bit more mixed and closed and they happen almost simultaneously and with less time or room for things being missed. So I don’t know, do you see your work being able to synthesise those processes more directly?
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

In other words, I see Errant Journal as an alternative publishing practicesalternative to the exhibition format. But this got me into trouble when a funding application was rejected for this reason. I’ve been rejected for funding many, many times, but one of them happened in the beginning when I said Errant Journal is like an exhibition. And they were like, no, it’s not. So I thought about it and realized that for many people, an exhibition is a collection of images — something that is visual. For me, an exhibition is something that tells a story and is able to do this from different perspectives. So I thought that was a funny experience, sometimes you learn from rejections.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Then everything got spoiled. So I’m not so sure that I’m the best person to talk to about what’s happening now or the future because alternative publishing practicesI’ve actually withdrawn from circulating works publicly. I’ve tried to maintain a practice of private publishing now, of unique publishing, of making one-of-a-kind things that, although informed entirely by the digital, are mostly analog in their production because they cannot be usurped, hijacked, or detorned in the worst ways possible that really just ended up happening to everything on the web that I loved. So I’m trying to just make a protected space for myself because I’ve been doing this for so long. We’re coming up on 30 years of UbuWeb, which still functions, but I’ve lost my passion for the digital pioneering that I was so invested in. I feel sad. I feel lost.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 57:20 politicsI mean, the notion of silence is violence, it was only one type of discourse that was allowed to be spoken anyway, as you’re saying, a discourse of noise was not permitted. A discourse of nonsense was not permitted. A discourse of perversity was not permitted. This was a totally contradictory notion. There is only one type of voice that’s allowed to be expressed. I find that kind of repression to be fascistic in its own way. So, it’s become complicated. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an English word that’s called woodshedding. Sometimes, guitarists in particular, would just drop out for a really long time to work on new techniques and to just go into the woodshed and disappear for a while and come out with some other thing. So I think that this notion of disappearance can be really productive and also really radical, but also, there’s just so much fucking noise. I mean, everybody now has to be so public all the time. What is that? Why do we have to be so public?
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 08:07 I see it as crucial. traditional publishing practicesThe point in which “Entreprecariat” and small independent publishing intersect is in the fact that making a book, in the traditional sense (in a way that lasts, is distributed, has an ISBN, et cetera) is very difficult. The actors that are active in making this happen are very minimal. Especially for the kind of literature that I’m interested in both reading and writing, the options are small and they are becoming smaller. Currently, that’s my primary concern. I’m sorry if I take too long, but I think it’s a crucial point to articulate my understanding of expanded publishing. alternative publishing practicesIn the past I’ve been mostly interested in the weird experimental EPUBs or booking a JPEG, book as floppy disk, a super long form that is interactive and so on… Nowadays, it’s a bit of a disappointment that many of digital objectsthese experiments, after about 10 years, are completely forgotten unless there is someone who, again, converts them into the traditional book — by the way, that’s what happening, for example, with the book by Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff that is coming out now for Spector Books, “Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism”.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesThe thing I appreciate of independent publishing (without going too much into this) is that kind of selfless, thankless job of putting the community in the front without that ego reward that the author gets. I think that an author, at one point, should also be active on that other side and communityit would be nice if every author would dedicate part of their time to do the less visible job of bringing to the front the work of the community, the intelligence of the community. Another point that comes to mind is that very often the publisher is an individual, literally an individual. For example, the publisher of my last book is an individual who has boxes in his house, so I think something is fascinating about the fact that it’s hard to imagine that behind the publisher, very often, there is just a very generous, very committed individual.
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 26:34 It’s cool to think about this, really. alternative publishing practicesIt’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think toolsTwitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion on that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing something social. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you’re asking about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 1:01:48 Maybe firstly, I would discover the value in positions that are not present yet or marginalized. Seeing whether there are new ways of thinking about things such as video games, for example, and expanding on those areas. alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to the publishing itself, find ways to get rid of the idea that there’s one expert for an entire topic, try to have a broader pool of people working on books, and to see if the books themselves can be made public for everyone. To have them online and in some way digitize them is very important, but maybe there would be a way to have book presentations you can record for YouTube or something similar. So people can have a summary of it and maybe even something interactive. Or you can do an event where you have a chat function and people can react to parts of your books, this could be before it is published. If you look at video game companies, they do this beta testing where they have almost-finished version of the game. People can openly play it and you can see how they react to it and what they think of it. In terms of publishing, this could mean that the publisher isn’t the only one who receives the draft before it’s edited, but that other people can read it and provide their first impressions. But the most important part is that it get’s published in some way and that it is accessible for free, although this is very difficult to do with the financing system nowadays.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 05:27 toolsI have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I just leave my Google Doc open with comments left on, sharing it privately with people and saying, you can share with friends, but don’t share publicly. And those pieces were very widely read and engaged with. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an interesting thing where if information feels like you are not meant to see it, or you have to work a little harder to see it, it becomes more interesting because effectively all information online today feels like an advertisement. So if there’s something that’s not trying to be seen, that’s automatically a point of differentiation. I just keep finding a lot of success communicating that way. Some of my friends run a project called MSCHF, which does strange releases. They have a Google Doc that they title Friends and Family Discounts, and they share the Google Doc with direct links to purchase, and things will sell out from that even more than they will from a website. I think Substack is a great tool. I use Ghost for my personal website, just because I don’t want Substack to be my website, because then it just looks like everything else.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audiences and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead we can flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audiences and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead we can flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 25:21 I like the idea of making anything collectible. And the idea of making a piece of digital work something that can stand on its own as a single thing to engage with and interact with. I think the hardest thing most creative people and writers of all types struggle with is the distribution and being seen. And I don’t think these are good dynamics. alternative publishing practicesBut it’s very easy to imagine a world in which a release could offer to add referrals to the split. And you could say 10% of the split from this release will be distributed among everyone who refers a sale. And all we would need to do as a platform is to provide unique share codes when someone copies a URL. And it would just incentivize people to share. It would also incentivize spam. But I think that there are interesting ways to think about opening up the split or opening up the contribution.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

While the content and ideas presented in the book were significant, alternative publishing practicesChimeras was also a reflection on its context, understood both as an epistemic concept — it created a space for an imaginary, decentralized community through the coalescing of independent contributions in a larger project — and a commercial reality — the book’s radical absence from the market and the difficulty of placing it properly within existing publishing and distribution channels. business modelsChimeras transcended its role as a mere vessel of knowledge, morphing into an operational model for working together. Herein lies the radical, transformative power of books — not in the words inscribed and the physical forms and materials of the book, and certainly not in the failing fragile markets they so strongly rely on, but in the relationships and context that books deftly orchestrate.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

business modelsThroughout its two years of existence, the Expanded Publishing Consortium has proposed to explore a few key actions to address these challenges. The project explored the development of different publishing formats that can be carefully designed to complement and expand a book’s thematic focus, incorporating feedback from audiences and peers to enhance and sustain its impact. The project aimed to build context around individual publications, organizing, for example, DJ parties, live streams, and interview sessions with publishing experts and invited guests — as done by NERO for its multi-format Ammasso events, and by INC for its The Void experimental broadcasts — as way to provide an additional layer to a book’s content. alternative publishing practicesAdditionally, the consortium has been working towards establishing an expanded publishing toolkit that offers a scalable, adaptable, and replicable operational model across the publishing industry. The toolkit seeks to promote more inclusive knowledge-sharing within the publishing community, focusing on tools and practices that can continuously scale through a larger consortium. toolsThe toolkit is produced using alternative tools such as Reduct, a video-editing tool that allows collaborative work with AI-powered transcription, and Etherpad, an open-source tool that enables real-time collaborative text editing with version control, similar to GitHub, and supports multi-output functionalities from the same initial document, both materializing as a website and a ready-to-print PDF. The toolkit is published with versioning in mind; instead of culminating in a single publication moment at the end of the process, toolsEtherpad allows multiple publication moments throughout the process (e.g., raw transcription, commented version, responses, etc.), accommodating different temporal scales in the publication pipeline.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

According to referencesFlorian Cramer and Roscam Abbing’s discussion on the federated social media platform social mediaMastodon, a federation, much like a chimera, “allows diverse entities to preserve some internal rules while still being able to communicate with each other.” Silvio Lorusso, “Federated Publishing: Roel Roscam Abbing in Conversation with Florian Cramer (Report),” Making Public (blog), May 20, 2019 With Laurent de Sutter, writer and editor at Presses Universitaires de France, we had the opportunity to work together on a confederation plan for European cultural operators that could address the acute asymmetry in cultural funding across European countries and the fragmentation of different language markets and audiences. referencesIn Belgium, for instance, publishers and other book professionals are often subsidized as part of a cultural policy that supports the ongoing professionalization of cultural workers. However, this is not the case in Italy or Greece. For smaller presses, whose business model typically involves print runs of only a few hundred copies, offset printing — a technology reliant on economies of scale — makes the production of books prohibitively expensive. alternative publishing practicesThis often results in small print runs with low profit margins and high break-even points, making them either outright unaffordable or forcing the publisher to rely on print-on-demand services, staple-bound Xerox zines, or risograph printing. These alternatives, however, come with their own challenges, such as restricted print quantities and difficulties in securing widespread distribution. All of this makes it a challenge for small presses and young publishing workers (such as comics artists) to professionalize. A model of federalized publishing would allow smaller presses to collaborate and produce books that may be financially unviable to produce alone.
from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesBut let's take it one step at a time. There are two milestones in the development of shitpublishing: Print on Demand (POD) platforms and ChatGPT. Desktop publishing on POD platforms, like lulu or Amazon, expanded the limits of publishing, thereby approaching the uncanny book valley. The automation and the speediness of the publishing process on these platforms is closing the gap between posting and publishing. Publishing something on lulu only takes 15 minutes longer than posting something on a blog. And even though for a lot of internet goblins, 15 minutes is an eternity, for others, those minutes are well spent turning internet rubbish into something greater.
from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesLLMs not only accelerate the writing and publishing process, but also the lifespan of books. The temporality of these publications is beyond fast reading or accelerated obsolescence. These books reconfigure conceptual writing and the attention economy in a wild way. They are not meant to be read but to endlessly circulate on Amazon. They are spectral images of books. Their life span is not fast but immediate. The cover, the title, the description, and the tags are the only content that matters. The content is relegated to the metadata. This idea is brilliantly represented in Chuck Tingle’s book Pounded In The Butt By My Bizarre Assumption That Chuck Tingle Books Are Just Covers And Not Actual Books.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

Three years later, while we might not be confined to our homes anymore, alternative publishing practicesvideo streaming practices have successfully infiltrated academic and artistic research publishing. This mostly happens in unassuming ways — yet another online speaker series, another webinar, a publication launch, a lecture performance, or just a regular internal meeting — hybrid setups have become an expected, although downplayed, element of the publishing workflow. traditional publishing practicesOn one hand, this entails the repurposing of devices and practices of video production, once relegated to the highly professionalized industries of film and TV, later amateurishly adopted by video game streaming, video blogging, and video essay online niches, for the broader culture and educational sector. conditions of workOn the other hand, creates the expectation for both “creative”, “immaterial” workers and traditional publishers to become a new sort of (un)professional AV technicians and producers.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

A great deal of the research we do at THE VOID conditions of workis about embracing our newfound roles as AV technicians. This has allowed us to learn that working with “content”, with “ideas” or “theories” entails working with moving images–at the very least with images of ourselves or of a guest speaking, but most probably also with memes, all sort of internet found footage, software interfaces, and produced video content such as video essays or performances. Crucially, working with images also means working with hardware: with cables, monitors, cameras, video switchers, green screens, routers, lights, cloud storage, mixers, and a long etc. If moving the conversation away from content towards publishing is an acknowledgment of the material and social conditions of the production and distribution of the former, what alternative publishing practicesTHE VOID is then trying to advocate for is an expansion of the tools and social dynamics of print and online publishing to include those of video production.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

However, after our participation in the Internet Cafe Exhibition organized by the Salwa Foundation in July 2023, we started to shift our focus towards streaming hybrid events. This event marked the realization of several key aspects that would determine our practice going forward. To begin with, it became clear to us that figuring out how to make the green screen studio setup mobile and adaptable to different spaces was a fundamental part of what we are doing. The studio was not a backdrop to take for granted, but something akin to an installation piece. alternative publishing practicesThe equipment — cameras, monitors, switcher, mixer, cables — but also ourselves, were not to be hidden but part of this installation at the center of a live event.
from: index (pad)

alternative publishing practicesThis text also functions as a toolkit for expanded publishing: it is tagged and hyperlinked to form a navigable framework for exploration. Recurring themes throughout the book serve as organizational markers, enabling thematic and non-linear reading in both web and print formats. The articles were tagged collectively, each resulting in different ways of highlighting and reading a text according to individual preferences.