What can an open, insurgent publishing body do? – An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis – Undercommoning

"Minor Compositions is connected to but not completely the same thing as Autonomedia’s regular publishing line. I also wanted to experiment with making everything open source and freely available. So, it required a somewhat different workflow and digital hosting than other Autonomedia books. But, it’s still very much a part of the same overall project....

I think one of the things about publishing that I didn’t realize until I got more enmeshed in its belly is how much of the funds go to costs of distribution. For instance, let’s say if you’re going through a commercial distribution channel, through the book trade, you might only be getting back on average about 30% from the sale. That makes it quite difficult to hold together printing costs. Those are just sort of very basic logistics in publishing. I was hoping that you’d have more widespread and faster forms of circulation and publishing ideas by making things freely available online than you could have within conventional channels or at least ones that I was aware of.

Also, I was interested in the question of: to what degree can radical publishing be open? What does the ‘openness’ in open publishing mean, and how far can that go? To paraphrase Spinoza, it’s to ask what the body of open publishing is capable of, which is perhaps both more and less than you might think at first. There is difficulty in being sustainable and making a project able to support itself. It’s an experiment and also a provocation to see what’s possible...."