[Commlist] New book: Publishing as Collective Infrastructure

Now available for ordering and/or free download…

*Publishing as Collective Infrastructure*
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1918

/What if a book wasn’t an endpoint but an infrastructure?/

/Publishing as Collective Infrastructure/ challenges the idea of the 
book as a fixed object and reimagines publishing as a collective, 
political, and infrastructural practice. Emerging from the ServPub 
project, this book brings together artists, academics, technologists, 
feminist server collectives, and experimental publishers to expose how 
contemporary publishing is shaped by extractive platforms, proprietary 
software, unpaid labour, and opaque infrastructures. Against this 
backdrop, the authors develop and document alternative models grounded 
in free and open-source tools, collective authorship, feminist care 
practices, and self-hosted, small-scale infrastructures.

Blending theory, documentation, and reflection, the book explores 
publishing as a full-stack practice:  spanning writing, design, 
software, servers, logistics, and governance. It addresses topics 
including ambulant servers, wiki-to-print workflows, versioning and 
forking books, radical referencing, and autonomous publishing, while 
situating these practices within broader debates on infrastructure, open 
access, and knowledge politics. Rather than offering a blueprint, 
/Publishing as Collective Infrastructure/ functions as a living 
experiment and pedagogical resource. It invites readers to think with – 
and work through – the infrastructures that make publishing possible, 
and to imagine how knowledge might be produced and shared otherwise.


*Bio:* /Publishing as Collective Infrastructure/ does not have a single, 
unified author. Instead, it is a polyphonic work shaped by the shared 
labor, ideas, and practices of multiple collectives and projects working 
across experimental publishing, feminist infrastructure, open-source 
design, and autonomous knowledge production. The book emerges from 
collaborations involving In-grid, Minor Compositions, noNames, Shape, 
and Systerserver, with contributions from Constant, Creative Crowds, 
Hackers & Designers, OBF Experimental Publishing Group, TITiPI, & Varia. 
Together, these groups contribute situated perspectives, technical 
practices, and collective forms of authorship that reflect the book’s 
commitment to publishing as a social, infrastructural, and political 
process.

PDF available freely online. Available direct from Minor Compositions site.
Release to book trade 15 January 2027

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