Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

We have tended to speak of the model of publishing for the last hundred years as if it were a perfect one, but look at all the indie presses that arose in the last 20 years, publishing National Book Award winners, Pulitzer winners, Nobel winners. What happened to those books before? They weren’t published! They. Were. Not. Published. Sure, some were, but most? Nope. We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesn’t mean they didn’t ignore a great many more … So we’re restoring the, we think, the natural balance of things in the ecosystem of writing and reading.

Most fundamentally, digital removes isolation. The corollaries: an increase in connectivity, a mutability of artifact, continuous engagement with readers, and most excitingly, a potentially public record of change, comment, discussion—digital marginalia—layered atop the artifact, adding to the artifact, and redefining “complete.”