Publishing As Collective 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.