Part reader, part toolkit, part living archive, .expub asks how publishing infrastructures might become more sustainable, modular, and open; what formats could fully realise the long-standing promises of multimedia publishing; and what the future of publishing looks like beyond platform monopolies and the binary of print and digital. The volume gathers essays, interviews, and hybrid publishing tools — from podcasts to print-on-demand, stream-based releases to online collaborative writing — and was written and edited collaboratively using Etherport, an open-source tool linking live writing to web-to-print publishing. The book reflects the practices it investigates: decentralised, modular, transmedial, and open-ended. The volume is organised in two sections.
Section 1 — Essays. Contributions by Sepp Eckenhaussen, Geert Lovink, Ezequiel Soriano, Annette Gilbert, Jordi Viader Guerrero, and Ilan Manouach. The essays examine the political, economic, and infrastructural conditions of expanded publishing, and the operational models through which artistic, scientific, and independent publishers experiment with new combinations of format and technology. Section 2 — Conversations. A series of conversations held at Nero Editions in Rome from 2 to 4 July 2024. Consortium members — Lorenzo Micheli Gigotti, Marcela Okretič, Janez Fakin Janša, Ilan Manouach, Tommaso Campagna, Marta Ceccarelli, and Carolina Valente Pinto — interviewed Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Thomas Spies, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Gijs de Heij, Yancey Strickler, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Dušan Barok.