Publishing as Collective Infrastructure

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.

Ordering Information

Available direct from Minor Compositions for the special price of £10 + shipping.

240 pages, 6 x 9
UK: £18 / US: $24
ISBN 978-1-57027-454-1

Release to book trade 15 January 2027