Post-Digital Book Cultures

The post-digital publishing paradigm offers authors, readers, publishers and scholars the opportunity to engage with the production and circulation of the book (in all its forms) beyond the conventional boundaries and binaries of the pre-digital and digital eras. Post-Digital Book Cultures: Australian Perspectives is a collection of scholarly writing that examines these opportunities, from a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, with the aim of engaging with the questions that define post-digital book cultures beyond the role of e-books. Examinations of digital publishing in the literary field can often be characterised as either narratives of decline or narratives of revolution. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, what has become clear is that neither of these approaches accurately encapsulate the role of ‘the digital’ on contemporary publishing practice. Rather than upending book publishing culture, the emergence of digital technologies and platforms in the field has complicated and recontextualised the production, circulation and consumption of books. This collection of essays brings together contributions from scholars and industry practitioners to consider the changing nature of the production of the book and the circulation of book culture within a post-digital context and platform enclosures.

Dr Alexandra Dane is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Gender and Prestige: Contemporary Australian Book Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 

Dr Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the ANU. Her books include the monograph Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and essay collections Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy (Monash University Publishing, 2019), and Publishing Means Business: Australian Perspectives (Monash University Publishing, 2017).