INNOVATIONS IN PUBLISHING SYMPOSIUM Sept 2024

Photo credit: © Oswin Tickler

After three successful annual symposia, we hosted another group of researchers to explore further innovations in publishing in September 2024. This year, topics included the effects of attributing on innovation, a teaching project on AI in scholarly book production, and the cartelisation of Anglophone trade book publishing.

Entrepreneurial Competencies for Innovation and Sustainability in Small Press Publishing: A Sociocultural Systems Strategy Approach Using the “Publishing Model Canvas 1.0” for Professional and Teaching Purposes

Daniel Corona Cunillé, Edebé and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico

In today’s rapidly changing publishing industry, postgraduate programs aim to prepare students for the practical challenges they’ll face, particularly in small publishing houses. Success in this sector requires innovation and sustainability, driven by entrepreneurial skills. This presentation highlighted the key entrepreneurial competencies and introduceed the “Publishing Model Canvas 1.0” as a practical tool for professional and teaching purposes.

Small press publishers must integrate financial management with their cultural role in shaping discourse, recognizing their dual responsibility in producing both meaningful content and a profitable business. Balancing Soft and Hard Architecture A recurring challenge in publishing is the tension between editorial teams (soft architecture), who focus on curating quality content, and financial teams (hard architecture), who prioritize profitability. Successful publishers need to bridge this divide, fostering collaboration between creative and business teams. Historical figures like Aldo Manuzio exemplified this balance by innovating both creatively and commercially to build a lasting publishing enterprise. The Uncertainty Principle of Publishing Books exist in a dual state—both as commercial products and cultural objects. This “uncertainty principle” mirrors Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, where a book’s value can fluctuate depending on the observer. For publishers, this means balancing the financial aspects with the cultural significance of their offerings. The canvas provides a practical framework for small publishers to navigate the complex interplay between creative vision and business sustainability, ensuring long-term success by focusing on cultural and commercial innovation.

You can access the presentation slides and the Publishing Model Canvas here:

Managing Digital Innovation in Publishing

Dr Frania Hall, University of the Arts London, College of Communication, UK

While digital transformation has impacted much of the publishing industry, there is still a lot of reliance on legacy workflows that can impede publishing innovation.  While readers shift across platforms and media, many publishers continue to focus their digital developments, particularly in the consumer sector, on transferring content into digital media (ebooks etc.) rather than developing digital-first products. While these formats are important, they don’t fundamentally rethink what digital publishing could be. Developing new digital products requires a different approach, both in ideation and workflow, yet this can disrupt the print processes that are still fundamental to many publishers

The dilemma for publishers therefore is how to innovate without distracting from the day to day publishing activity of a company. This research involved 4 detailed case studies on different publishing sectors to explore how collaborative activities are evolving in publishing in order to develop new types of digital products. From these cases it is clear that working with partners in the wider creative industries—software developers, designers, media studios, even competitors—not only brings different sorts of necessary expertise together, it also helps organisations break out of print‑centric thinking and adopt more flexible, exploratory approaches.

The collaborations studied shared a variety of characteristics that reflected their entrepreneurial and exploratory nature. What was significant was that they developed particular ways of working that allowed them to be autonomous. This I termed para-organisations: semi-independent spaces where teams can develop digital ideas without the constraints of traditional workflows, pricing structures, or risk models. This allowed experimentation to flourish while the main business continued to operate with stability. The organisations featured a range of different partners, who brought divergent thinking; all those involved had high levels of autonomy and power, which allowed for effective decision-making. These collaborative units did not have specific vision in mind but were able to be fluid and agile in how projects formed.

Another key finding was organisations successful at innovating had developed collaborative mindsets – ways of encouraging staff to think beyond their siloes to consider opportunities, explore connections and develop entrepreneurial networks.

These approaches allow publishers to develop new ideas, experiment successfully, while acknowledging that digital projects work differently from their legacy processes. As consumer media habits continue to shift, the industry will need these collaborative, exploratory spaces more than ever.

Coding the Printed Page: A Year On

Oswin Tickler, University of the Arts London, London College of Communication, UK

Creative coding as a means of producing variable digital print has opened up new possibilities for the publishing and print industries, most concretely through the creation of HP Spark by HP Indigo. The research has been put into practice through 13 workshops reaching around 300 participants, from sixth formers to postgraduate students and design agencies, with impacts including increased engagement, demystification of coding and a collaborative dynamic between participants.

Designed materials have demonstrated the commercial and creative potential of the approach: BAFTA Film Award brochures across film, TV and games ceremonies produced around 8,000 unique covers, while Artefact magazine’s Cost of Living Crisis issue ran to 1,000 unique covers. The variability of each piece increases desirability and reduces waste, with BAFTA noting improved pick-up rates as a direct result.

The research sits within a broader ecosystem of open-source tools and AI developments, with ChatGPT now able to generate the underlying p5.js code from text prompts, potentially lowering barriers further. Looking ahead, there is interest from Penguin Random House and ongoing conversations with paper manufacturer GF Smith about expanding the workshop model, alongside potential funding through paper’s status as a foundation industry.

Effects of Attributing on Innovation

Ann-Sophie F.-Vorndran, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

The public discourse in the trade press of the German publishing industry regarding the tension between technology and culture appears to be driven by hard-to-grasp, emotionally charged factors – so-called attributions – that can act as obstacles to the industry’s capacity for innovation. These attributions take the place of an objective engagement with the issue and can make such an objective examination more difficult, favoring instead a phenomenologically driven negotiation of the topic – regardless of its actual potentials, risks, and challenges.

The aim of this Ann-Sophie’s research is to develop a reference model in combination with an evaluation matrix designed to support the sustainable, long-term overcoming of such emotionally driven discourses, and which can be adapted and reused for different phenomena.

AI in Publishing to the extreme: Writing a Book using ChatGPT – the Take-Aways from a Teaching Project with Springer Nature

Prof Dr Christoph Bläsi, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany

Conducted in collaboration with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Springer Nature, this teaching project examined the integration of AI into book production. Through a structured semester-long process, students from Mainz and Edinburgh collaborated to create a book using ChatGPT, addressing both the opportunities and challenges of generative AI.

The project followed clearly defined stages, including designing the book, drafting and shaping its content, and revising and finalising the manuscript. While ChatGPT proved effective in supporting the creative process and generating substantial amounts of text, its limitations included stylistic inconsistencies, near-repetitions, and inadequately expressive vocabulary. The project reinforced that, despite its capabilities, AI does not yet replace the role of authors, and human involvement to ensure textual coherence and quality remains necessary.

As algorithms take on tasks traditionally performed by human contributors to maintain the standards and identity of the publishing profession, questions arise regarding the core competencies that remain uniquely human. These include content evaluation, decision-making in complex editorial contexts, and audience-oriented processing and formatting. The study also underscores the importance of adapting educational and research priorities to the evolving landscape. Publishing education must incorporate foundational knowledge of AI systems, book history, and copyright law, as well as practical experience with emerging technologies. Future research should focus on the further development of algorithms, the integration of symbolic knowledge, and addressing social and ethical considerations in AI’s application to publishing. Overall, this project demonstrates the need for critical engagement with AI in publishing, ensuring that technological innovations complement rather than supplant the human-centred elements of the industry.

You can find the whole presentation here.

Cartelisation of Anglophone Trade Book Publishing and Its Postcolonial Impact

Dr Sonali Misra, University of the Arts London, London College of Communication, UK

You can find Sonali’s thesis here.

Victorian Serial in the Digital Age: Serialized Publishing in the Wattpad Book Ecosystem

Swara Shukla, PhD Candidate in English Philology (with a focus on Book Studies), University of Münster, Germany

Since its launch in 2006 as a platform revolutionizing mobile-phone-driven reading, Wattpadhas seen immense commercial growth over the last decade through collaborations, partnerships and publishing deals with traditional book publishers like Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks, among others. It launched its own book publishing division, initially called Wattpad Books, in 2019. Following its acquisition by a South Korean company in 2021, it currently operates as a book publishing ecosystem called Wattpad Webtoon Book Group, which consists of 4 publishing imprints and have 60+ book publications. Serialization is the dominant writing and publishing strategy on Wattpad’s platform, which generates the reading metrics that articulate the consecration parameters for the book group to make decisions about publishing original stories on the platform in the book format. I approach this serial-to-publishing workflow in Wattpad’s book ecosystem through the historical preface of Victorian serial culture, wherein original fiction was serialized in monthly and eventually weekly periodicals, and often culminated in traditional volume formats after the serialization process. By reappraising how processes like author branding and paratextual interaction worked in the relationship between the Victorian serial and its volume counterpart, I reframe and remediate the serial-to-codex relationship in the “platform-dependent” model of book publishing (Poell, Nieborg and Erin Duffy, 2021) demonstrated by the Wattpad Webtoon Book Group. Eventually, I seek to explore how digitally-driven serialization, like that exemplified by Wattpad, can offer an avenue to examine larger questions around digital-print hybridity in publishing and the exaltation of the traditional print codex in contemporary book cultures.