by Drew Davidson

Director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh

In the late summer of 2008, ETC Press went live with a public beta, launching with 2 titles and the goal to release around 4 or so a year. As of this writing, there are around 6 projects in process for publication in 2009 and 2010. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the story and process of how and why ETC Press was started. I helped get it going, and am currently serving as the editor, so I’m going to share my perspective on the inspirations and ideas that have led to ETC Press.

ETC Press is a publishing imprint with a twist. We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. It is an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com.

ETC Press has an affiliation with the Institute for the Future of the Book and MediaCommons, sharing in the exploration of the evolution of discourse. ETC Press also has an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to place ETC Press publications in the ACM Digital Portal, and another with Feedbooks to place ETC Press texts in their e-reading platform. Also, ETC Press publications will be added to the ThoughtMesh.

ETC Press publications will have a focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields. We are looking to develop a range of texts and media that are innovative and insightful. We are interested in creating projects with Sophie, and we will accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.).

Authors publishing with ETC Press retain ownership of their intellectual property. ETC Press publishes a version of the text with author permission and all ETC Press publications will be released under one of two Creative Commons licenses:

• Attribution-NoDerivativeWorks-NonCommercial:
This license allows for published works to remain intact, but versions can be created.
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike:
This license allows for authors to retain editorial control of their creations while also encouraging readers to collaboratively rewrite content.

Every book will have an associated website open for comments, which could be considered for subsequent versions of texts. The ETC Press website allows registered users to download versions of publications, and share creative new interpretations as well as add comments to the current publications. ETC Press is partnering with Lulu to enable instantaneous multiple versions of publications and foster a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. The idea is to make ETC Press publications as accessible as possible and best enable the sharing and discussion of ideas and concepts.

The initial concept that led to the founding of the ETC Press started with my doctoral dissertation. Back in the mid 90s, I was writing my dissertation in HTML (hypertext markup language) since I was interested in taking advantage of hypertext links within my text, as well as links out to the web at large. My committee was supportive although I received several comments about the desire to “write” comments on the pages (bear in mind that this was before the advent of weblogs).  Concurrently, I discovered that the graduate school was unwilling to accept a website for a doctoral dissertation. This led me to create a conceptual mapping of the website into organizational and topical categories that enabled me to shuffle the sprawl of all the various pages into a linear order that I could then print out and submit to the graduate school as a text. These two experiences served as the initial inspiration for exploring cross-media scholarly work that took advantage of both the hypermedic nature of the web as well as the solid tradition of discursive texts. Across time, I dabbled with colleagues on database-driven solutions that would automatically enable an author to write multimedia texts that could then be output as websites or texts and more, and I continuously researched related work and projects, since I found this to be an interesting new avenue of discourse.

Starting as a professor, and then Director, at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University afforded me the opportunity to more fully explore these nascent ideas, and with the support and vision of Don Marinelli (co-founder and Executive Producer of ETC-Global) the idea of an innovative, experimental publishing imprint started taking shape. This could provide a venue for authors interested and willing to push the envelope on the nature of scholarly work across media that fit into, and extended, the mission of the ETC. So ETC Press was a go, now we just had to figure out what the actually meant (both logistically and conceptually).

What followed was about 18 months of work on the concept and logistics. The concept came together much more quickly. We formed an external advisory board and an internal editorial group and began laying out how to implement an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint. We used Drupal (an open source content management system) and incorporated the Book Module so that we could host all our publications online. Lulu was an important partner in the entire endeavor, their ability to publish on demand in several formats and across different media, has enabled us to actively create multiple editions of texts. Creative Commons licenses help us to encourage readers to remix publications (which in turn we could publish as more editions). The Institute for the Future of the Book, and their multimedia authoring tool, Sophie, help us encourage authors to stretch their ideas on how the “write.” Similarly, ETC publications will be entered into Thoughtmesh, which automatically tags content and illustrates connections across texts. And all ETC Press publications will be entered into Feedbooks e-reading platform so that it can be read digitally across a variety of devices. The ACM Digital Portal has agreed to archive all ETC Press publications, which enables us to reach every university library that subscribes to ACM (and most do), and BreakPoint Books, which hosts bookstores at professional conferences, will carry ETC Press publications. All of these relationships are helping us explore and experiment with the idea of scholarship and publication.

Also, there were many other groups working on similar initiatives. We continually search for and get in contact with others doing similar work. We are looking for supportive and collaborative opportunities as well as the chance to learn from their ideas and concepts. The Electronic Book Review has been going for many years, and continues to innovate. HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is another group doing interesting explorations in this space. Both the Open Humanities Project and the Public Library of Science are working to increase the distribution of ideas. Digital Culture Books is also working on similar initiatives and is another innovative publishing imprint. The Institute for Multimedia Literacy is currently developing Sophie 2.0, and Culture Machine is putting out Liquid Books. And many authors are addressing the problems and promises of open crossmedia publications. James Boyle, Christopher Kelty, Gary Hall and Lawrence Lessig all have books out on the open source nature of ideas, and Kevin Kelly and Chris Jackson have written some thought-provoking articles on the future of publishing. All of the above have been invaluable in helping shape the direction and mission of ETC Press.

At the same time, we were working on the logistics of running a small academic publishing imprint. We had some funding interest from both the publishing industry as well as foundations. After discussion with our board, we decided to remain independent in order to most freely experiment. We worked with CMU Counsel to hammer out contractual agreements for authors that would clearly state that they retained ownership of all their intellectual property while granting ETC Press permission to publish a version under a Creative Commons license. Concurrently, we worked on an agreement with Lulu to have them handle all of the finances on both sales and royalty payments. This enabled us to bootstrap the start of ETC Press with essentially no overhead and the primary involvement of myself as Editor and John Dessler (an ETC professor and talented new media designer) as well as input and advice from the advisory board throughout the process.  A downside is that we don’t have any marketing budget really, but we try to use the web, email lists and social networks to help promote the ETC Press, and CMU Public Relations is also supportive with press releases. That said, our goal is less about making money (although we don’t run at a loss) and more about the open sharing of ideas.

We plan to remain small and focused to enable us to experiment and work out our multimedia publishing process. This is definitely an experiment in the notion of publishing, and we invite people to participate. We are exploring what it means to “publish” across multiple media and multiple versions. We believe this is the future of publication, bridging virtual and physical media with fluid versions of publications as well as enabling the creative blurring of what constitutes reading and writing. As mentioned at the start of this article, ETC Press is currently in public beta and welcomes all comments and suggestions.

References

ACM Digital Portal. http://portal.acm.org/

Boyle, James. The Public Domain. http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

BreakPoint Books. http://breakpointbooks.com/

Creative Commons. http://creativecommons.org/

Digital Culture Books. http://digitalculture.org/

Drupal. http://drupal.org/

Drupal Book Module. http://drupal.org/node/284

Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

ETC Press. http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/

Feedbooks. http://feedbooks.com/

Hall, Gary. Digitize this Book! http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/hall_digitize.html

HASTAC. http://www.hastac.org/

Institute for the Future of the Book. http://www.futureofthebook.org/

Institute for Multimedia Literacy. http://iml.usc.edu/

Jackson, Chris. Books Unbound. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1873122-1,00.html

Journal of Electronic Publishing. http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/

Kelly, Kevin. Better than Owning. http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php

Kelly, Kevin. Scan this Book. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html

Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits. http://twobits.net/

Lessig, Lawrence. ReMix. http://remix.lessig.org/

Liquid Books. http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/

Lulu. http://www.lulu.com/

MediaCommons. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/

Open Humanities Project. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

Open Publishing Lab. http://opl.rit.edu/

O’Reilly. Tools of Change for Publishing. http://toc.oreilly.com/

Public Library of Science. http://www.plos.org/

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. http://www.arl.org/sparc/

Sophie. http://www.sophieproject.org/

ThoughtMesh. http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/

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