Book Publication as Community Formation

Digital distribution and affordable print on demand technologies are now a fact of publishing. The inefficiency of traditional print models are no longer a cause for concern as writers can now easily reach and establish a global readership.

In his talk entitled “What is Publication?”, Matthew Stadler, the founder of Publication Studio discusses how a book gets from publishing to publication? He describes publication as the creation of a public, which is an essentially political act.
Publication is created through deliberate acts: circulation of texts, the formation of debates to talk and contend in physical space and the maintenance of a digital commons. It is this space of conversion surrounding a given book which beckons a public into being. This can now occur quickly and easily.

Bob Stein, the founder of the project, Socialbook.com, touched upon this at the Unbound Book conference. He explains how the book is a place where readers and authors congregate. With SocialBooks, he hopes to build an interactive ecosystem for publishing that assumes that books are places where people gather.
The concept of the publication community as mentioned by Matthew Stadler is similar to Stein’s notion of perceiving the book as a place where the public congregates.

The nature of the public here is not one-way, but rather an ongoing, reciprocal conversation. Stadler explains how publications require the willingness to listen and change depending on needs, context sensitivity, equanimity without hierarchy, transparency and finally, relationships and conversation. All elements are essential for both the creation of a viable publication and also for an effective social reading platform.

As more realize and take these ideas into account, the easier it will be to produce an abundance of literary works and subsequent reading communities and publics.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/24310741[/vimeo]
Bob Stein at the Unbound Book Conference: “Social Reading is No Longer an Oxymoron”.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14888791[/vimeo]
Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio.

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