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business models

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from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

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 traditional publishing practicesbig 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. business modelsBig 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.
from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

business modelsFirst, 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, conditions of workexperimental 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.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

Carolina 22:21 You were just talking about how you combine your other work with the collective work and how you also bring your individual experiences into Clusterduck as a collective. When preparing this, I saw in another interview that you gave that you define yourself as business modelsemployed in the creative gig economy by day and meeting online at night. I’m curious if you can expand on that, how you work towards sustainability of your collective and how you operate in this way.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

Noel 32:43 The relationship between the corporate jobs that we have, which have a lot of limitations and issues that we face is self-evident. On the other side, the deal is very clear, and sometimes it’s more honest than what you have in the cultural industry because business modelsthe cultural industry thrives on grey zones of informal work. It’s much more apt at colonizing your free time and your passions, while at the same time criticizing exactly those kinds of things, and that’s what makes it feel weird, to say the least.
from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

The legal entity behind the server is an NGO that ran a festival for many years. business modelsIt used to run partly on grants when we did events. Now our main source of income is donations, and we have one or two websites for larger cultural initiatives that we charge for. We’ve been able to run it this way for 17 years.
from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

Dušan 54:49 That’s a big question! For example, the multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb been around for many years. They do amazing things with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and, a few months later, publish them in translation. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they like Monoskop. They decided that they would share all their books with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and their Monoskop page became a large MaMa library. digital objectsThey are also open about it: one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They don’t sell PDFs, only the print copies. business modelsIt turned out that free digital distribution helps print sales, because the more people read the books, the more they're discussed. digital objectsIf you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, you need a PDF. printed objectsBut if you want to read the book cover to cover, print is better. That’s how it will always be.
from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 30:02 I don’t feel particularly concerned about those big publishing houses to be honest. Why would I be concerned about the profit margins of these big companies that often produce books that aren’t worth publishing in the first place. I am concerned about the circulation of ideas and culture connected to the smaller presses that you’re describing. Also, the future of books: I love books, of course, the physicality of a book, I like reading from paper rather than from screens. I suppose small companies need to develop very particular business models that respond to the conditions within which they’re operating. Sternberg Press would be a good example of that. business modelsFor books we do with them, we are funding the production relatively cheaply. They’re small pamphlets, they only cost about 1,600 euros to produce. They’re printed in Lithuania, and quite cheaply. That's the Sternberg model. We pay for it using research grants. So we try to build a contingency in the research we’re doing to distribute the ideas that emerge from that research, but also to make sure they are distributed. It does get out there, it does reach a public. Then Sternberg makes money from those sales, and we’re perfectly happy for the money that comes from those sales to go back to them to be able to operate. That’s a very particular business model, it’s quite straightforward in a way. That’s what a lot of places do, Open Humanities Press do something similar. Their books are produced very cheaply because they’re print-on-demand, but as an academic, you have the ability to be able to subsidize the operation and then rely on them for the distribution. Then the money that comes back from that goes back into the project.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 21:36 business modelsThat’s quite a challenge, to be honest,. I’m not sure that OSP currently is or has a sustainable business model for its members. What we try to do is to make the development of the tools part of the work. We do not separate the making of the tool and the making of the design, but we try to further the tool during the making of the design. We also have a document that we call the Collaboration Agreement. Through this, we try to explain our practice towards future collaborators. So the function of it is to, from the start, make clear that the work on the tool is part of the work on the design. So to come back through this “practice shapes tool shapes practice”, the idea is to extend the functionality, making something new possible, which in the case of the Almanac, means to go towards a printed object from multiple paths. This is as much part of designing the object as it is to think about the font or the layout of the book.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Irene 19:01 That’s also funny — I find it strange that in the funding system of the Netherlands, even the smallest cultural organizations are supposed to have a business model. My business model is not a very traditional one. I always take it slow, one or two issues at a time, also depending on what else is going on in my life. I do look ahead, of course, but I didn’t set it up to think that things are going to be a certain way because it doesn’t work like that. This has been a reason why I’ve been rejected by funders as well, for not having the right business model. I find that very funny because, again, the way we work and the way we live are being pulled apart. I’ve been living like this (as a freelance cultural worker) for over twenty years: I can look ahead for a few months, but not more than that. So I started an organization, it has no overhead, no buildings, and no staff, and yet I’m expected to make a ten-year projection? business modelsI was told that Errant Journal wouldn’t last because it doesn’t have a good business model. I found it very strange because the only reason Errant Journal would stop is if I don’t feel like doing it anymore. Financially, I can keep going, especially with this model, because I haven’t set myself up to produce a certain amount. A distinction is made between organizations and artistic practice, while for me, this doesn’t exist. This is my artistic practice, it’s just that because of how things are structured, I am required to have a board and a business plan etc.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Irene 26:29 The space I ran before was also a residency, and we had an open call. But when you’re looking for ‘other voices,’ business modelsan open call is not necessarily the best way. In my experience with the residency, 99% of applicants will be white artists from northern/western Europe, all making the same kind of art (and calling it experimental). I also see other organizations doing open calls, and spreading the call widely and then using the amount of people that respond as a sort of marketing tool or indicator of their popularity. “Look, we had 700 people reply.” But what’s the point of that? Again, why this performance for the funders? When Errant has an open call, I actually don’t promote it that much because I don’t want quantity, I want quality.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 02:06 My name is Silvio Lorusso, I’m a designer by training, an artist, and more and more, an author. My involvement in publishing and experimental publishing has several branches, I started at the INC (Institute of Network Cultures) with an interest in researching business modelsprint-on-demand, which at the time was a new thing — you can imagine how many years ago we are speaking of. This led to a certain interest in the platformization of publishing, such as Amazon, Kindle, and systems of rights management. Then I did my PhD thesis in Venice on experimental publishing, which was focused on the artistic experiments around platformization and enclosure.
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 11:53 It was clear to us that we needed to reflect on the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, coming from three different generations and three different fields of work. Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway and is the oldest among us, he also has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of the two books I mentioned, so she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style. I myself sit somewhere between writing academically and also organizing those panels – the let’s play critical panels. sustainability of workflowsSo we regularly exchanged ideas, via Zoom, due to Holger being in Norway. We also met in person several times. For us, it was very important to give the authors a sense of working together on a project, which is why we set up a joint meeting before everyone started writing. For this, we specifically asked experts to cover various areas. And fortunately, no one declined. We granted them relative freedom, including in formatting the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript, a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support and finance the entire project. This is not common as publishers usually are not prepared for such volumes. As you know, they either focus on academic publications or non-academic literature. So, normally academic volumes are funded by universities, but we were not based on any university for this volume, even if we worked on them or at universities. So we had to find a way to finance the whole project. As I said, business modelsTranscript has this funding from, I think, different universities from Germany. They have a pool of money and they can split it into different projects. So this was very good for us, and they also funded Open Access, which was also great.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

The last thing I will cite is a piece that I did as a part of the Dark Force Collective, a piece I spent five years on, called The Post-Individual. I thought a lot about how I wanted to release it. It was originally going to be a book. business modelsThen I had the idea to release it as a limited edition zip file where someone could pay $5 or whatever they wanted and they would get one of 250 editions that had this piece inside along with a video of me introducing it and an audio recording, and my research notes. All 250 of those editions sold out in a week, so I got paid $1,000 for that piece.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

We dug in and discovered a way that we could build a system like that using Stripe. And so the way we have made it is that business modelsfor every release on Metalabel, there is a record agreement where anyone who’s listed as having credit on a release can be added from a drop-down, and you set a percentage of money that will be directed to them. You can also choose the treasury of your group, which is just a pool of money that will just sit there and not go anywhere. Every transaction from that release goes into a private account for just that release, where the money sits on top, and it has all the logic of the split underneath. You can also add in hard costs to be recouped. So in the case of my Dark Forest book, the first $8,000 would go to one account to pay back my printer and my shipper, and then only after that $8,000 was crossed would the split happen. But the money builds up in that transaction.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

The purpose of the Chimeras book was to shift the conversation about AI away from a purely technical narrative to a broader discussion about the technology’s impact and potential. It aimed to foster an environment where alternative viewpoints could thrive, challenging the notion that computer science holds all the answers regarding AI’s influence and possibilities. The figure of the chimera was particularly evocative in that context; chimeras have often been used to address cultural anxieties or to symbolize the integration (or lack thereof) of cultural and natural elements, reflecting how societies understand complex interdependencies. business modelsBy employing various partial approaches and divergent disciplinary perspectives, the aim of Chimeras was to approach its subject indirectly — not to reduce it to its most essential, familiar, or structural components, but instead to complexify it. politicsThe interdependencies in that context were reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the book, which embodied a diverse range of epistemic perspectives that are less represented in the general discourse about AI, including interspecies, crip, monstrous, distributed, and decolonial approaches, among others.
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)

Considering book production in a federated mode is an approach that writers such as referencesGeert Lovink, Florian Cramer, and Silvio Lorusso, among many others, have been exploring for some time. In comics, federalized publishing is a concrete reality. Many of my own conceptual comic books, as well as Tommi Musturi’s governance and ownershipwork and that of others, are published simultaneously by several publishers across Europe. This allows publishing shareholders to benefit from government support from countries they don’t have access to it, such as Belgium’s FWB or France’s CNL. When publishing my comic books, each publisher functions like a shareholder. business modelsPublishers pre-purchase only the number of copies they can distribute within their respective territories. This model presents the advantage of sharing investment and risk among stakeholders with different budgets and audience sizes. By pooling resources, every publisher invests based on its capacity, its risk tolerance, and its expected return, not because of economic demands that are hardwired into the technical processes of offset reproduction.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

A federated model of publishing also has the benefit of eschewing the myth of a mandatory, yet often rare, alignment among the network’s various stakeholders. business modelsThe federation’s stakeholders do not have to strive at all costs to align with one another or to transfer expertise from one domain to another. Instead, as Schmid suggests in her discussion on interdisciplinarity, they should focus on building iterations. Referring to complex modelization processes and the expansion and development of computer technologies and simulation programs, the term “iteration” refers to the repeated application of a process or procedure to achieve a desired outcome or refinement over time. Each iteration represents a cycle of development, learning, and adjustment, contributing to ongoing improvement or the realization of a goal, emphasizing the idea of persistence through continuous effort, revision, and adaptation. Following Schmid’s epistemology of modelization, models have the capacity to mediate between different ontologies and are necessary buffer zones between theory and experience, or between experience and fact. A federation of publishers operating on different scales and with different capacities would allow for new cartographies of knowledge where non-overlapping disciplinary fragments, hypotheses, and other research ingredients from different disciplines could be put into play in a rich cognitive setting. By establishing a relative disciplinary cohabitation, a federation of publishers would be positioned to address fragments and bodies of knowledge in a horizontal fashion, while remaining totally independent from the formation and the institution of these very same disciplines.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

For publishing projects where publishers want to keep a relative independence in the production process, i.e., maintain their own design and reproduction pipeline, a federated network can be operational at a higher level in the conceptualization of a publishing project. business modelsFederated publishing, involving stakeholders from various countries and languages, could address a significant shift in the translation market; in the humanities, the emerging value of having one’s book translated into multiple languages represents a notable change in market dynamics. For many acclaimed writers and authors, reaching broad, multilingual audiences increasingly offers more cultural significance and prestige than simply releasing another book on a university press, and in English. With the saturation of English-language publications, the true scarcity now lies in the ability to connect with diverse linguistic communities globally. This new emphasis on multilingual reach highlights the importance of cultural resonance. Embracing a federalized model consisting of cultural operators situated in different language markets allows publishers greater leverage to collectively access writers they would hardly be able to approach alone. It also allows them to disseminate their work across different regions, reinforcing the demand for unique, localized content that resonates deeply with readers in a multitude of cultural settings.