LogosPub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104071
Robbe Vandersmissen
{"title":"From Grey to Great?","authors":"Robbe Vandersmissen","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104071","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the possibilities for aspiring writers who wish to invest in publishing their work without the involvement of an established and external publishing house have grown tremendously. The aim of this article is to look into the global trend of ‘hybrid publishing services’ that operate in the grey zone between traditional publishing and self- publishing. Particular attention is given to the case of Hoi Publishing in Sweden. On the basis of empirical findings on the company’s legal and financial status, company turnover, and symbolic capital, the article examines the status and position of Hoi in relation to similar-sized royalty publishers in order to analyse how its business model fits into the contemporary Swedish literary publishing field. The findings of the case study are supplemented with survey data from 715 authors, publishing professionals, and literary critics, gathered in 2020.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139164635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104068
Adam Hodgkin
{"title":"Climate Breakdown and Book Publishing","authors":"Adam Hodgkin","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104068","url":null,"abstract":"This article notes the ever-increasing urgency of immediate action on climate change across all sectors. The publishing industry is aware of the need for action, measurement, auditing, and detailed reporting. Two of the largest STM (scientific, technical, and medical) publishers, Springer Nature and Elsevier, have started publishing annual reports covering their activity on climate change and sustainability. The article also considers attempts that have been made to measure the carbon impact of individual books. Such studies are inconclusive, and may not be helpful if the physical product is still GHG (greenhouse gas) costly in a time when all sectors need to drastically curtail GHG impact. The paper notes the need for continuing and sustained focus on mitigation and adaptation and suggests that the prospects for highly inventive adaptation through the long-established and growing ‘digital turn’ ongoing in publishing for 60 years are encouraging. A full digital transformation may yet be possible, necessary, and able even, in effect, to subtract the GHG costs of paper publishing from the global balance sheet measuring our climate breakdown.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139163294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104070
Alison Baverstock
{"title":"My Research Journey in Self-Publishing","authors":"Alison Baverstock","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104070","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, Alison Baverstock reflects on her research into self-publishing: its methods, its impact, and the motivation and demographics of those involved. She considers its initial frosty reception and its new position at the core of an area of great significance to the publishing industry, the wider creative economy, and society at large.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139163656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104069
Jocelyn Hargrave
{"title":"Life Before and After","authors":"Jocelyn Hargrave","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104069","url":null,"abstract":"‘Good’ editorial practice – in this case, post-developmental copy-editing work – is typically measured by an editor’s ‘positive invisibility’ (J. Hargrave, Teaching Publishing and Editorial Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2022). Traditionally, editing has been considered a ‘role [that] tends to be pushed into the margins’, taking place ‘behind the scenes’ and existing ‘everywhere and, therefore, nowhere’ (S. Greenberg, ‘When the Editor Disappears, Does Editing Disappear?’, Convergence, 2010, p. 8); a hidden, mysterious business transparent only to those who practise it. Editorial practice is hence often (mis)judged by physical invisibility on the page: that is, an absence of error. An editor’s value is predicated on their positive invisibility, an outcome of which can be their marginalization. With the distinction between work and home life essentially eradicated in the COVID-19 gig economy of 2020–2021, central questions posed for this context were simply: ‘How did editors cope with the work-to-home transition?’, ‘Did editors become more invisible and/or marginalized during COVID-19?’, and, ‘If so, what was the nature of this invisibility and/or marginalization?’ Editors were contacted in 2020 and 2022 to describe their editorial practice and its potential (in)visibility before, during, and after the 2020–2021 pandemic lockdowns. Their responses exposed their at times polarized experiences and work – life challenges, and ongoing systemic problems in industry.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139164920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104062
Jaka Gerčar
{"title":"The Obliteration of Publisher Identity","authors":"Jaka Gerčar","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104062","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The title of this paper is taken from a chapter in Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher , in which the Italian publisher and writer notes a historical shift in contemporary publishing away from publishing as ‘form’, supposedly a publishing innovation of the first decade of the 20th century. Since Calasso never elaborated on his notion of publishing as form, this paper attempts to sketch the most important facets of this notion, embed it in the context of publishing theory, and suggest that it bears considerable similarities to auteur theory in cinema. After identifying three layers of publishing form, the author analyses how recent developments in contemporary publishing might relate to Calasso’s concern about the blurring of distinctions between publishers.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135919435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104064
John Rodzvilla
{"title":"What Outfit Shall the Protagonist Wear?","authors":"John Rodzvilla","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104064","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Online fiction platforms like Wattpad, Tapas, Choices, and Episode have created new models of digital storytelling that serve billions of readers a month who access the content through apps and websites. Through a free-to-read (F2R) model these platforms offer access to thousands of online prose narratives. Instead of requiring money upfront for access, they have found a way to monetize narrative through ad-supported serialization and paywalls. Some companies have also begun to offer reader customization through microtransactions similar to those in the mobile game world. This paper examines how these platforms are using the F2R model to create a compelling reading experience that personalizes the text and keeps readers engaged with textual content.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135919434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104063
Simon Frost
{"title":"Economic Imaginings of Consumption in Book Retail","authors":"Simon Frost","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104063","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Far from being a conventional trade in consumer goods, with price value estimated from a relationship between demand and scarcity, book retail is saturated in the politics of class, gender, and race. To thrive, it must be alive to the promises and pitfalls of those dimensions, especially as they are imagined through reading. Therefore, to understand book retail only through institutionalized models of neoclassical economics would be a mistake. A mistake not only because book retail trades in symbolic goods, which are goods of an inherently interpretive, political, all-too-human kind, but also because symbolic goods defy foundational categories such as ‘consumption’. From a historic case study, that of book retail in Southampton around 1900, it can be shown which forces have actively sustained the book business. Revealed, too, is how economics is merely the material mathematized wing of a particular cultural-political way of thinking, one that can be broken free from without losing either business or responsibilities to race, gender, and class.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135919290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1163/18784712-03104065
Arūnas Šileris
{"title":"Digital Social Reading","authors":"Arūnas Šileris","doi":"10.1163/18784712-03104065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-03104065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study examines the interplay between the motivational needs of adolescents when engaged in digital social reading (DSR) in school settings and also their digital social reading behaviour, measured by the amount of the primary text read and the intensity of written communication. The study shows that in a digital social reading situation the basic human needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are represented proportionally, without any one need gaining a greater prominence. Although students working under different motivational conditions read similar amounts of the primary text, the intensity of written communication varied significantly depending on the text. We attribute this difference to story world absorption. Stories with a higher story world absorption rating elicited twice as much written communication than less absorbing stories. The implications of these findings are discussed.","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135919289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LogosPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.24101/logos.2023.55
Aušrinė Kulvietytė-Cemnolonskė
{"title":"Lietuvos istorijos epizodai M. E. Andriolio kūryboje","authors":"Aušrinė Kulvietytė-Cemnolonskė","doi":"10.24101/logos.2023.55","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24101/logos.2023.55","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18064,"journal":{"name":"Logos","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136008400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}