Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing

Books contain multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing is a three-part research and scoping report created to support the Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package (WP 6) of the COPIM project. It also serves as a resource for the scholarly community, especially for authors and publishers interested in pursuing more experimental forms of book publishing.

This Work Package will produce an online resource to promote and support the publication of experimental books. This report has been produced to support both the development of this online resource and the pilot cases we are developing together with partner presses (including Open Humanities Press and Mattering Press) as part of the COPIM project. In parts one and two of this report, we situate experimental books in the context of academic research and map current experiments in book publishing in order to create a typology accompanied by a selection of examples of experimental book publishing projects. In part three of this report we then review existing resources on tools, platforms, and software used in the production of experimental books, and we sketch a roadmap and methodology towards the creation of the online resource mentioned previously. To support the pilot cases we have made a start with exploring two key practices within experimental publishing and the creation of experimental books that feature within this online resource: collaborative writing and annotation. As such we outline tools, platforms, software, and workflows that support and enable these practices next to describing the desired aspects we argue this technical infrastructure should cover.