(I noticed that I never put this text on my own blog. I wrote it for the twenty years Valiz anniversary publication, Future Books(s), Sharing Ideas on Books and (Art) Publishing, edited by Pia Pol andf Astrid Vorstermans, Amsterdam, June 2023, p. 232-239. Thanks a lot for all the comments of Sepp Eckenhaussen, Silvio Lorusso and Florian Cramer).
“Imagine being able to exist without having to explain yourself to everyone, all the time. That’s the goal.” Hrag—”Nobody can think unless he stops.” Hannah Arendt.
Complaining is one, creating alternatives another. This is also the case for do-it-yourself publishing. While the number of publishing platforms may have multiplied, the gatekeeping power of ‘mainstream media’ remains as dominant as ever. While new apps such as Clubhouse, Substack and TikTok made it into the mainstream, the publishing status quo occurs to be remarkably resilient. Never underestimate the hegemonic coupling of giants such as Bertelsmann, RELX Group and Pearson with the platform logic. What counts is the marketing budget thrown at a title. Will reviewers and influencers be on your side? This largely depends on the (social media) advertisements. While ‘visibility’ measures may have shifted from search/Google scholar rankings and bestseller lists to the power of followers, likes and manipulation of algorithms, a growing movement of writers, researchers and artists are turning their attention away from data-driven ‘impact’ measurements to the joy of hybrid experimentation. Another public sphere is possible. There is a small but thriving post-digital publishing scene that is no longer merely concerned with the counter-cultural value of its own ‘cool’ identity image (typography and graphic design) but shifted its practice to a growing variety of materials and channels, from SciHub and t-shirts to Mastodon and Discord, from riso-printing to blogs and memes accounts on socials.
As numbers of bookstores dropped and the grip of Amazon on distribution grew, technical possibilities to produce independent publications and market them via social media grew at a similar rate. Here at INC we have been developing alternative publishing channels ever since its founding in 2004. In this essay I provide an overview of technical and design experiments, showing that is possible to question dominant knowledge formats such as the peer-review journal article, the academic monograph, text book and anthology as defined—and gatekeeped—by a handful of metrics driven by big publishing tech.
Initially INC started with a blog and three series: 20K word brochures called Network Notebooks that came out as pdf and a free paper version (until 2014), the annual INC Reader that still exists to this day (#15 being the Critical Meme Reader) and the defunct Studies in Network Cultures, published together with the NAi Publishers in Rotterdam—a heavily subsidized monograph paper book series. Coming from the world of networks, collectives, social movements and NGOs, it was precisely this genre of the English-language monographs of ‘emerging’ authors that proved the hardest to crack. The idea was that such monographs could establish careers of new media outsiders. However, the NAi series had to stop after the post-2008 financial crisis because of brutal budget cuts in the subsidized Dutch art system. With production costs of up to 25.000 euros that had to be pre-financed, for a print run of 1000 copies, selling the title for 25 euros in bookstores, one can do the math. The venture had reached upper levels of absurdity. More and more, INC forced to retreat into the ‘free’ virtual domain, radically reducing costs while exploring the edges of digital publishing. Indy publishing on a professional level, paying living wages to writers, editors, designer, printers, logistics and booksellers, can only be done either in an economy of scale or a generous grant system. Niche titles that will have to create their own audiences from scratch, lacking proper PR budgets are becoming increasingly impossible to produce. Some aspects will have to let go.
Part of the digital publishing experiments are a number of conferences that were organized, together with our long-term partners at the Rotterdam art academy Willem de Kooning, such as the Unbound Book (2011, Amsterdam/The Hague), Boek uit de band (2012, Amsterdam), Off the Press (2014, Rotterdam) and Urgent Publishing (2019, Arnhem). All materials were brought together in the Out of Ink-Future of Publishing Industries blog, spanning a seven year period from 2011-2017.i The research also built on the work of an earlier HvA research group of Joost Kircz and INC’s own publishing practices that go back to 2004/ 2005. Here we could also mention my earlier ‘track record’ in alternative publishing, going back to the late 1970s, founding squatting newspapers Grachtenkrant and bluf!, via Raket & Lont (that published Het Beeldenrijk of our theory collective Bilwet/Adilkno in 1985) and my membership of the editorial board of the student publishing house SUA. In the late 80s I worked at the (post-)video art magazine Mediamatic and co-founded the post-squatters Ravijn publishing house, before moving into the turbulent internet age with collective publishing efforts in 1995-1998 as part of the net art/net criticism nettime mailinglist community.
There was—and still is—never a shortage of alternative publishing practices. The starting point here was a once existing post-1968 ecology of do-it-yourself media that controlled its own production chain, from content production, from printing presses, distribution channels and bookstores in the service of social movements and underground cultures. During the 1990s this integrated infrastructure of progressive movements disintegrated, making way for a transitional ‘tactical media’ approach (local mixtures of zines, labels and pirate/free radio to CD-ROMs and television experiments), ultimately making way for the techno-cultural shift towards multi-media and computer networks. By the late 1990s the internet quickly became the dominant publishing and distribution platform. The mid 2010s post-digital hype that propagated a return to the zine-type of material ‘maker’ culture has not (yet) been able to scale up and a create a sustainable production and distribution network. Platform dependency remains a cultural fact.
It was only in the past decade that we started doing specific critical research (and a related MA program at Piet Zwart Institute), performed in the wake of the 2007 launch of the iPhone and Kindle e-reader and related rise of social media. Worth mentioning is the INC applied research project that resulted in the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit (2013-2015). This is a still popular manual that introduced the low cost, platform independent ‘markdown’ publishing workflow with a special emphasis on creation of e-pubs for smart phones and tablets. “The toolkit is primarily aimed at publishers who, in most cases, cannot afford to outsource eBook design to external service providers; secondly because it is aimed at those who wish to keep the design process in their own hands.”ii The research project consisted of a series of workshops, small research teams consisting of designers, programmers and publishers that worked on prototypes, culminating in the Off the Press conference and the production of the toolkit.
From 2015-2015 a separate semi-autonomous research entity existed, attached to INC, called PublishingLab, coordinated by Margreet Riphagen and Silvio Lorusso, together with external partners, accompanied by a group of international interns. This laid the groundwork for our second two year applied science research, approximately with the same partners, called Making Public, centred around the notion of ‘urgent publishing’ (2018-2020). Central here was the growing issue of speed. Is publishing in the age of real-time digital communication condemned to a role of documenting facts behind the fact? Publishers have always played an important role in initiating and stimulating the public debate—a role that has changed radically over the past two decades.
From the 2020 research report Here and Now:
“Despite the promises of the desktop publishing revolution and the immediacy of publishing on the web, acceleration and optimization did not speed up the publishing processes as much as hoped for. Speeding up the printing and publishing process is by no means straightforward. It seems that all too often, any one of the three success factors in publishing that we identified – namely speed, quality, and positioning of the publication with an audience – could only be realized at the expense of the other two. Speeding up can mean a sacrifice on the side of quality because there is less time for editing, or a too heavy focus on quality can mean that the positioning of the publication with an audience will fall short and the speed of publication will undoubtedly suffer. This puts pressure on the role of publishers as catalysts of public and cultural debates, and on their publications as hallmarks of quality. How can publishers keep making content available to the public in a prompt, appealing, and focused way?”iii
In a related 2021 publication Miriam Rasch summed up the findings of Urgent Publishing:
“How to achieve an optimal balance between the speed, quality and positioning of a publishing project? In a media and publishing sphere dominated by breaking news, hype cycles and metrics, how do you keep up your quality standards and care for your publics, while also being part of ongoing societal debates? How can publishing in this context be a tool for critical community building?”iv
In the same publication Florian Cramer discusses the similar strategies of Jordan Peterson and Nathalie Wynn aka Contrapoint. He lists the criteria like this:
“1. Speed, thanks to the immediacy of YouTube as a publishing medium, in contrast to traditional publishing; 2. Reach, thanks to the ubiquity of YouTube/the internet; 3. Tapping into existing subcultures and popular desires, discourses and concerns (as opposed to scholars, mainstream news media, and traditional publishers who are not in touch with them); 4. Partisanship; dividing the audience into either followers or adversaries; 5. Meme-ability; where the quality of a statement lies less in its reasoning or consistency, but its potential to ‘go viral.’”
What’s important here is to the see the evolution of these criteria during the research and how these were adjusted. How should slow books relate to real-time videos and memes that are shared by thousands? Florian Cramer sums up the progression made here: the criterion should be responsiveness, rather than merely speed. Reach should be looked qualitatively, rather than quantitative. And this: “Reaching a community does not need to mean alienating others—but identification remains crucial.” Cramer notes that memes do not spread in a vacuum, therefor ‘meme-ability’ can never be a general criterium as memes always spread in a community for which the publication is meant. He notices that today’s public intellectuals occasionally write for newspapers and make radio and television appearances but have yet mastered the tools and tricks how to become part of popular internet culture. However, he does observe a shift in the polarized post-Trump Dutch art academy landscape of the Covid-19, proving the thesis that Dutch design and contemporary art can meme. Different speeds and media cultures can tuned into each other but this requires ‘meme magick’ and a right mix of street cred and digital , literacy, an iconographic skillset that can effortlessly jump contexts and recombine them, from intellectual debates, philosophical references, artistic concepts to pop cultural icons.
In all these projects INC researcher and producer Miriam Rasch played a central role, working closely together with Margreet Riphagen and Silvio Lorusso, work lately continued by Tommaso Campagna and Sepp Eckenhaussen a.o. Often, the ideas and initial manuscripts end up at INC via scenes such as new media arts, net.art, media theory and tactical media activism. Besides these angles, INC established its own issue-based networks that work(ed) on topics such as online video aesthetics, net porn, ICT for development, critique of the creative industries, alternative search engines, social media critiques and Wikipedia studies. In recent years the MoneyLab network was most active. Established in 2013, MoneyLab is focusing on revenue models in the arts, with topics ranging from crowdfunding, cashless society, universal basic income to blockchain and a critique of the right-wing libertarian agenda of the crypto hype.
In 2009 INC launched its own ‘e-book’ Theory on Demand (ToD) series, based on initial research of Margreet Riphagen and designer Katja van Stiphout. This turned out to become the most successful formula, with a 42nd title published late 2021. The idea of ToD was to experiment with a range of formats and hand the knowledge over to interns that would work at the INC research centre, coming from around the globe, for a 4-6 months period to produce a number of titles, experiment with formats and document changes in the workflow. An internal work manual made sure that all experiences of staff, students, visiting fellows and interns that produced a Theory on Demand title would be stored. For INC experimental publishing is not merely GitHub code or avantgarde graphic design but living content. While there are rare instances of sudden, revolutionary changes, the everyday experience proves that the publishing practices is only slowly changing over the years and decades. A serialized approach makes it possible to work with authors around the globe that personally get to see what it means when their work is offered both as e-pub, pdf, on the web while still available on paper as print-on-demand (all too often the American platform Lulu). The only thing that’s missing here yet is the link to bookstore.
Up to now, the workflow of graphic designers that put together books has not changed all that much in the past 20-30 years. The default software in both industry and education has been Adobe’s Photoshop, later turned into InDesign. The big change inside this design paradigm has been Adobe’s shift to its Creative Cloud in 2013. However, this loss of ‘digital sovereignty’ of the individual designer, unable to work an offline copy of the software, has not changed the fundamental workflow of the printing procedure. Instead, Adobe’s attention has shifted to data extraction. Adobe’s latest Experience Cloud adds data and analytics to creative work. As T_HQ explains, “digital advertising and marketing can now be managed, executed, evaluated, and optimized with the company’s offerings. Collected data will help organizations enhance their social marketing and targeting, optimizing the overall creative process. Essentially, the features pull more collaboration across departments from creative teams, crafting their designs to finance officers in charge of marketing budgets.”v This is the faith of designers, destined to become integral marketeers and data managers.vi
It important to, again, state the obvious, that over the past 10-15 years all definitions in this field have been questioned, deconstructed and reframed. In the age of social media all uploaded video, audio, text, likes, comments, swipes can and will be considered publishing. The ‘prosumer’ never innocently watches. It is no longer about passive consumption. All media definitions have been turned inside out and blown up. What is a book, a so-called real paper object might still be there but both production and the way it is embedded in networked data systems. It’s vital here to break on through to the other side and understand the physical appearances as a more or less random form of materialization. Instead of dividing culture and technics, it is important to see publications, first and foremost, as digital or technical objects, as described by Simondon, Stiegler and Hui.vii There is a primacy of the digital here.
Arguably ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ books have always been technical objects. However, in the digital age, we tend to look at books as nostalgic, somewhat sad objects, unnecessary materializations, wasteful stuff we carry with us, unnecessary, premium mediocre items of an age gone by, ‘dead forest’ symbols of nature destruction, from an industrial age of mechanical reproduction that lack vital 21st century functionalities such as search, metatags, video. Why can’t we click on books, swipe the pages? AR advocates would say we already can… Did designers forget to include the interface? Maybe one day we will. Until then books, newspaper and magazines remain dead trees, static, frozen objects, time capsules that stores the author’s historical oeuvre. Such a ‘cultural monument’ approach obviously ignores the idea of the ‘living book’ that is part of an everchanging social network that surrounds the apparently singular status of the ‘author’. Ideas, stories, references, oral or stored, have always existed. Books have always been hybrid. This is the beauty of As temporary condensations of knowledge.
The experiments discussed here work from the assumption that alternative content and formats should be seen as one project. Up to this day, all too often, dissident thinking is confining itself to dominant media architectures of past ages, from the magazine longread, the academic journal article, newspaper op-ed to the book-length manuscript. In this rigid system direct contact with the communication flows of the online billions remains rare. Generation Z skips the 300 pages of textual ornaments, packed with complexities and nuances and immediately enters the core ideas level. Start with the meme summary. Why not? There is no need to endlessly repeat the hi vs. low culture debates. At the same time we see a growing industry of content management. Unfiltered open comment sections remain rare and considered a thing of the past. The problem here is not so much a withdrawal of the intelligentsia in the ivory tower of academia. This issue here is framed as an all-out war against trolls and deviant opinions of the Online Other. There is no lack of translation devices or gateways to create necessary (global) dialogues between isolated social groups. Quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, we’re not interested in discussion in the first place. This makes it hard, if not impossible, to improve ‘social’ publishing tools.
What also lacks are new protocols and counter distribution channels that can scale up. The diagnosis of the regression, the slump and crisis has all too often been made. There is a wide consensus that we cannot go back to ‘old media’ nostalgia nor should uncritically adapt to Silicon Valley standards. Another platform is possible. We need scalable experiments that can go beyond the niche of personal expression with the aim to come to a systemic change of the media landscape. Who should change it if not us?
Let me take out an aspect of experimental publishing that deserves more attention: the critique of peer review and alternative editorial quality assurance mechanisms. So far, digital publishing experiments primarily focused on formats and platform delivery. However, the ‘democratization’ of publishing ultimately also involves change of editorial choices. The redesign of (collaborative) content selection in an age when (at least in the ‘free’ parts of the world) anything can be put online, has been overshadowed by the rise of new gateways such as social media algorithms, influencers, hidden content moderators and AI. The dominant idea is that while the publishing industry has fundamentally changed, information we read online is still the same.
While ‘fake news’ is now an established category, such cult of organized distrust against news journalism has not (yet) extended to publishing. While there is good reason to suspect the ideological agenda of giants such as Penguin Random House, Springer, Elsevier and Hachette, there is a lack of public debate about their influence. While the growing power of Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) is everyone’s mind, the overall societal debate is simply not focussed on publishing. The morally bankrupt open access discourse, actively contributing to the profits of the publishing giants, is only adding to the overall sense of malaise and stagnation.
Compared to the promises of a decade ago when Apple launched its iPad, reading tablets have not replaced paper books. At best, these can be considered additional devices, a market dominated by Apple, Samsung, Huawei and Amazon’s Kindle. However, what has made inroads is reading on smart phones (despite the small screens), book-related podcasts and audio books. Together they form a ‘fuzzy’ reading culture in which new modes are slowly but steadily changing the overall picture.
As is the case with neighbouring contexts, the discussion shifts to standards and protocols, such as the use of ISBN versus ASIN, Amazon’s special numerical code, standing for Amazon Standard Identification Number.viii A glimpse at the ONIX for books codelistix gives you an idea about the often untapped possibilities of standardized e-book publishing as a public domain in which metatags become searchable on the open internet vs. the monopolized reality in which the Amazon website is becoming the defacto catalogue for ordinary users.
Much of what’s being discussed here comes down to a definition question: what’s a book in the age of the web? This is both a philosophical, economic and technical issue. In a five part article series Hugh McGuire proposes to develop a platform agnostic definition of a book as a discrete collection of text, as an internally complete representation of a set of ideas or emotions transmitted to readers in various formats.x Here, the boundedness, completeness of a book is emphasized. Regardless what format, what’s emphasized here is the ‘bookness’, defined as the beauty of limitation, accepting what’s been included and excluded. Against the romantic gesture to saviour the book as a historical human project we can put the ‘unbounded book’ as part of a digital media ecology in which a wild and fluid almanac is assembled from distributed content. A temporary, curated (‘bounded’) Gesamtkunstwerk of links to texts, video, audio, images and social media materials. Against the purist reduction of the book as a “full expression of an idea or concept” we see a culture of versioning that excepts–and fools around—with the fundamentally unstable, ever changing shapes of the world.
Please note, again, that the discussion no longer circles around the notion of the book as an object or ‘paper dump’. This is what we might call progress. Rather, the field of experimentation zooms in on the development of sustainable formats that arise from the process of formalization. We see a dialectic at play here between the artistic thesis, based on the creative discovery of one off linkages and the anti-thesis of the serialization of a well-defined prototype. The field needs to bring together artistic approaches with digital craftmanship. How do the disruptive questioning of (industrial) conventions with the design of new, but ultimately also limiting, publishing protocols?
—
i https://networkcultures.org/outofink/.
ii https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/from-print-to-ebooks-a-hybrid-publishing-toolkit-for-the-arts/.
iii https://networkcultures.org/makingpublic/2020/05/20/here-and-now-explorations-in-urgent-publishing/.
iv https://apria.artez.nl/what-is-urgent-publishing/.
v https://techhq.com/2021/04/adobe-decade-of-digital-transformation-to-the-cloud/.
vi In his Entreprecariat blog, Silvio Lorusso further investigates—and questions—the role of design and design education: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/. We will need to further discuss the link between the ‘disillusion’ over the possible role of design as changemaker and the increased automation of the profession through standardized templates and cloud-based software platforms.
vii See Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
viii https://argonauthor.com/isbn-vs-asin/.
ix https://www.editeur.org/files/ONIX%20for%20books%20-%20code%20lists/ONIX_BookProduct_Codelists_Issue_50.html
x https://hughmcguire.medium.com/what-is-a-book-in-the-age-of-the-web-part-1-of-5-3a529701e0df. See also his 2012 collective attempt to define the field with a futurist manifesto: https://book.pressbooks.com/.