Complaint becomes identity instead of action; complaint becomes the nature of the person making the complaint, a reflection of them (the feminist who points out the problem IS a problem)

And in Canada, ISBNs are free!

Honestly, if you're not having fun doing it, you won't be willing or able to sustain it! Fun is an oft-neglected but important part of indie projects.

Publishing really is a marriage of business and art, as Simone Murray's writing on feminist presses reminded us. You can't build a sustainable press, even a small and political one, without a business plan!

To what extent do you think we can read this post as a manifesto?

A concrete example of how they plan to model more equitably publishing practices. What other approaches can presses take?

Lots of connections to zine-making here!

Remember our conversations about the limits of "diversity" as a way of thinking about making publishing more just.

What do you think of this definition of publishing? How is it similar to or different from how you might have defined publishing?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/how-an-ethnic-sounding-name-may-affect-the-job-hunt/article555082/

This is all the more the case in industries where "it's all about who you know."

This use of diverse is problematic because the word itself is fairly meaningless ("showing a great deal of variety") and could as accurately refer to eye colour as to race and ethnicity. I wonder why so many companies are hesitant to name specific kinds of diversity, be they in terms of race, language, disability, gender, sexuality, etc.

Where's where the readings on sensitivity readers / own voices overlaps with the readings about diversity in the publishing industry: the argument here is that diverse publishers were acquire diverse books. Note here that I am using diverse to mean "varied in a meaningful way" not as code for "written by people of colour."

This, I'd argue, is the crux of the argument. What's at stake here?

This is the other piece of context I'd highlight: sensitivity readers are disproportionately used within YA publishing, where books often value teachable moments for young readers.

An important piece of context that often gets left out of the conversation: the commercial fiction market is still massively dominated by books/authors that do not care about these issues at all.

An important aspect of this criticism to note is that these sensitivity readers weren't actually commenting on the sensitivity of this representation but rather its accuracy. Albertalli had no idea what life at an HBCU is like. In many ways, this is an extension of doing your research.

This is the phrase where I think most of the divisiveness around sensitivity readers, cultural appropriation debates, etc. lies: the question of how far outside of your experience a writer can go. The significant thing to remember here is that not all experiences are created equal!

Another more recent version of this expanded distribution network is comics that don't do well as single issues distributed through comic books stores but are later gathered into trade volumes (which receive ISBNs and can be sold in bookstores) and then hit the bestseller list. This is anomalous, because for the most part a book that sells badly as singles won't be made into a trade, but when it does happen, it reminds us how these different distribution networks are finding different readerships.

If you wrap your head around only one part of this article, let it be this: how distributors and publishers impact readers and content.

A greater diversity of titles, but not catering to a diverse readership.

This version of the comic buyer is probably the stereotype most of us are familiar with; it's useful to remember that it's the product of a particular historical and industry moment, rather than natural and inevitable.

You probably know the word monopoly (when there's only one company selling something so they can control the price) but do you know monopsony? That's when there's only one company BUYING something. For example, you might say that for publishers in Canada, Chapters/Indigo has something approaching a monopsony (it's one of the few places the publishers can sell their books) while for the readers, Chapters/Indigo has a monopoly!

Radical technological transformation in an industry is both unpredictable and something that the industry must be prepared to respond to. The music industry has. Mainstream publishing... maybe less so.

In a microcosm, this is the argument for thinking about publishing as an industry. We may want to ignore these systems because we're more interested in the content, but this is how that content gets out into the world!

An interesting piece of countercultural publishing modes (like zines, podcasts, and webcomics) is that they aren't just independent of the mainstream but often speak back to it or explicitly critique it, so in a way they NEED the mainstream in order to fuel their critiques. At the same time, this centre/margin relationship is becoming increasingly porous as webcomic artists, for example, make their way into writing for Marvel or DC comics.

I believe Kaarina will be giving us some updated information on this topic!

Thus helping artists to secure readerships based on a sense of personal relationship between artist and reader.

This is an important logic of digital publishing: maybe there are only 100 people who are interested in erotic my little pony comics (for example), but if I can reach 99% of that audience and provide them something that REALLY speaks to them, they may be willing to pay enough to make it worth my while.

An important question for us, looking at webcomics vs big-two comic publishers, is going to be what constitutes a niche and who gets to decide.

Why might this be? Why aren't people experimenting radically with this new medium?

Why are we so fixated on the newness of digital media? What do we gain by saying "the Internet changed everything" versus recognizing media as a historical continuum?

Spoiler alert, this isn't what I think makes podcasts so intimate.

A strong argument that many of the conventions of podcasting are much closer to radio than we might assume (especially if we've listened to only a narrow subset of radio production).

Intimacy is one of the buzz words of podcasting, and is often described as being heightened in podcast listening over radio. Any sense of why that might be?

Ah, here they are!

Do you think younger audiences, encountering a particular form as a podcast for the first time, are likely to assume that form (the audio drama) was invented by that medium (the podcast)?

Reading against Berry's article, do you think this is accurate?

We could add manifestos and zines and blogs into this category. What else?

This is already a pretty outdated list, since Welcome to Night Value has a number of popular spin-off podcasts and several of these listed are no longer being produced. Podcasts move fast!

This sounds very fancy, but it's how almost all television works as well.

How many of you have had to read Bolter and Grusin's class work on remediation? https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/remediation

This offers an interesting counterpoint to the argument that podcasts are still hit-driven and privilege mainstream distributors, but is Night Vale perhaps the exception that proves the rule?

So in some cases podcasts become part of a cross-media publishing program, where the same basic content is being circulated across as many platforms as possible.

The question of whether podcasts are replacing radio or complementing it is an ongoing one. NPR recently made a decision to downplay their digital-first content in order to maintain focus on their radio content, because that's how they know how to make money; but when the de-emphasized the digital, a bunch of their best producers jumped ship and started their own networks.

This is so important! We rarely talk about the aesthetics of publishing (outside of design courses!) but aesthetics and materiality matter a lot for how things like zines communicate with us!

Refer back to the Chidgey reading and the deliberate difficulty of the zine on a formal level.

Compare this to the similar problem Murray notes in feminist publishing. We must always ask: who has the time/money to produce things for free?

This is really key to the logic of zine economies. Do you know what it means?

There's that "master's tools" situation again!

What else, beyond zines, might be included in this category?

Apropos of Laura's question about algorithms, I think this is an aspect of them we should all be concerned about: not that they exist, but that their exact operations are usually obscured, so we have no idea how they're shaping our worldviews.

What do you think of this contrast between the book and the robotic/mechanical Amazon?

the action by the state or an authority of taking property from its owner for public use or benefit: the decree provided for the expropriation of church land and buildings | the expropriation of assets by the government. • the action of dispossessing someone of property: a popular movement aiming at the expropriation of the landowners and the overthrow of the autocracy.

What are your impressions of this final sentence?

This is, I think, a good articulation of what manifestos do. They're like a rhetorical shake. They're meant to be jarring, disturbing, uncomfortable, loud, hostile, confrontational...

Do you think Luther's 95 Theses count as a manifesto?

Some questions to consider, as you think about manifestos: 1) What are the characteristics (rhetorical, aesthetic, political) of the manifesto as a form? 2) Who are manifestos for? What are they trying to do? 3) What are manifestos bad at? What can they NOT do?

Hasenbank urges us to think of the genres of print and the voices that are often excluded from how we think about publishing-for-social-change. What might you include in this list?

Note how multiple organizations are brought together via something called "movement culture."

This is KEY. No particular publication is identical with a cause. What is the relationship between publishing and social change that Hasenbank describes here?

Compare the Defender to the Femme Shark Communique; what are the aesthetics of radical print? How do they differ from the aesthetics of radical digital publishing?

This reminds me of this episode of the More Perfect podcast, which explains that anti-sodomy laws have remained on the books in the U.S. not so that people can actually be charged, but rather to create a sense of criminality around homosexuality that maintains social stigma.

It's this NETWORK of radical print (and now digital publishing) I want us to think about this week -- that includes pamphlets, newsletters, manifestos and more!

A thesis!

Cf our brief discussion of the Native Brotherhood using a newspaper as an organizational tool.

This is the great conundrum of publishing for social change, and one we'll have to come back to throughout this course.

This is a particularly significant question when thinking about anti-oppressive organizing. If it relies on volunteerism that is only possible for middle-class or wealthy people, is it truly anti-oppressive?

When faced with the choice of compromising your values to work within an existing system or going off and starting your own thing, what do you choose? What factors play into that choice?

A warning against expecting publishing itself to solve political problems?

The risk of your politics being a trend rather than part of a structural reshaping of how publishing works.

This is equally the case with 1970s nationalist publishing in Canada. In fact, lots of people are suspicious of multinational corporate publishers. Why might that be the case?

This invites a conversation about the importance of production methods versus public impact!

Williams on the word "Radical": "Radical seemed to offer a way of avoiding dogmatic and factional associations while reasserting the need for vigorous and fundamental change. At the same time it avoided some of the difficulties in REVOLUTIONARY (q.v.), making a necessary distinction between an armed rising and militant opposition to the political system."

Keep this in mind! Even if radical feminist presses are a thing of the past, we have a lot to learn from them!

This will sound familiar to anyone who knows about the history of small press publishing in Canada.

A useful reminder of how unproductive it is to create a hierarchy of things that are "more" or "less" feminist!

Pertinent to this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-publishing-is-overwhelmingly-white-and-female

It's great to point out that "diversity sells," but what about the forms of diversity that DON'T sell?

In a nutshell, this is a key reason why we see so many fewer small press initiatives in the 2010s that we did in the 1970s: the economic state of publishing has shifted. Why might that be?

What does this word mean to you?

A key dimension of many radical publishing houses is not just what they publish but how they go about the editorial process.

This is the dilemma at the heart of so many activist-oriented presses: they want to challenge the market dominance of mainstream publishing that often silences marginalized voices, but they still need to stay afloat somehow!

Note here the distinction between who runs the press and who the press publishes.

Why might this be the case? What about publishing so effectively coalesces major political movements?

This is important to remember. The argument that feminist presses made was that ALL publishing is political, some of it is just pretending to be apolitical (with the apolitical usually signaling complicity with the status quo). This reminds me of media coverage of the Black Panther movie calling it a "political" superhero movie, as thought the mere presence of Black people in a movie is somehow more political than that of White people. Why are some people and some perspectives read as political while others are not?

This basic premise -- that publishing is ideologically charged rather than purely based on quality and/or marketability -- is still central to critique of the publishing industry today. Can you think of any examples of this (the ideological bias of publishing) being the case?

What are some of the strategies women use to negotiate male-dominated fields?

It seems as thought journalism was their ticket to Spain, but Spain may have also been their ticket to journalism.

This is the case study Laura is focusing on!

Watts' life, her early activism and her decision to go to Spain, bring up an important question for me: What would drive a comfortable, upper-middle-class young woman to become such an advocate for working class and anti-fascist politics that she would literally risk her own life? What motivates people to fight for causes that don't directly impact them?

If you've never read anything by Livesay, look her up! She's one of our best poets.

So who had to Google the Spanish Civil War? Who already knew about it? Who didn't know about it but also hasn't Googled it yet?

This final sentence opens up some interesting questions about how we think about the role of publishing, historically. That is, how do we know what people were doing with, or thinking about, the materials they encountered? Were they reading them at all, and if so, how were they interpreting them?

What, if any, conclusions might you draw about French culture on the eve of revolution from these four types of books?

Do you think this difference is significant? Why?

Did you know? Book covers as marketing tactic don't come along until much later. At this stage, many book buyers want all their books to match.

We might compare this to the relationship between the "long tail" of books offered by Amazon and the selection you might see in an Indigo. Bookstores can't afford to stock one of each title; they need to order in bulk, and they need to order stuff they think will sell. What kind of titles do you see on the front tables in an Indigo?

Take a look at the books that are most frequently banned in North America. Banned books tell us a whole lot about what our society fears.

What role did the free market play in overturning the monarchy?

This reminds me of how people are willing to watch super low-quality pirated films; quality can indeed be a luxury!

Did you know that censorship comes from a position that use to exist, called a censor? The office of the Censor dates back to Ancient Rome, and was responsible for overseeing public morals. Hence anything that was deemed morally suspect by those in charge (e.g. challenging the divine right of kings!) would not pass the censor.

You'll need to do some reading between the lines with Darnton. What does he tell us here about the nature of book publishing in France in l'Ancien Régime? (That's the ancient regime, meaning the system of hereditary monarchy that was overturned by the French Revolution.)

DID YOU KNOW that P.T. Barnum (about whom Hugh Jackman has recently made a movie) launched his career by buying an enslaved woman and claiming first that she was the oldest woman alive and later that she was an automaton? Interesting work has been done on the link between minstrelsy and science fiction.

https://daily.jstor.org/joice-heth-how-an-elderly-slave-launched-p-t-barnum-career/

A beautiful example of how print culture can facilitate cross-historical and cross-cultural solidarities.

A bit of an aside, but it helps to flesh out the 18th century world of print: do you know what it means to subscribe to a book?

This is one of hopes we hold out about publishing: that it's a technology that brings people into contact with other experiences and worldviews from their own, and through this contact we might become more empathetic.

Democracies need literacy and a free and open media!

To what degree was the age of democratic revolutions made possible by PRINT?

To understand this, we do really need to understand the role that literacy and print played in the Protestant reformation.

Shockingly, although race has been amply proven to be a social construct rather than a biological category, there are scholars TODAY who attempt to argue for the existence of something called "racial IQ" that predetermines people's capacity for academic achievement based on inherited genetic traits. Ideas formulated in the 18th century have had a very long afterlife.

This feels remarkably contemporary to me. How many films, tv series, and books about Black experience still presume a predominantly white audience and operate by encouraging a white audience to empathize with Black characters? How does this presumption of audience shape how we think about media and its role in social change?

Why do you think virtualized Black voices played such an important role in the pamphlet wars? What were the pamphlet wars up to? Why were people engaging in them?

It will be valuable to put this in conversation with the role print played in colonization & conversion, with civilizations that were no primarily print-based being cast as less civilized (rather than as having a different information technology ecosystem, for example).

How do you feel about the inclusion of print, in its various forms, in the history of information technology? Does it make more sense to you to link print and the digital together as part of a history of communication, or to identify a fundamental rupture between the age of print and the digital age?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_(printing)

How do we decide what kind of texts/materials/narratives to pay attention to and legitimate, through teaching them, reprinting them, continuing to talk about them? What gets lost from our histories -- and why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberator_(newspaper)

Here's what an annotation looks like! If you can see this, respond so that I know you've successfully got Hypothes.is working!

Look up the translation of this and remember what technology Hugo was imagining print would supersede.

Sample annotation.

Testing hypothes.is on Project Muse websites.