Before La Cleta Cartonera collective published its first book, their mani-festo expressed two main ideas: the expendability of the book and the importance of publishing according to the editors' literary preferences. Here lies La Cleta's contradiction between the expendability of their production process and the precious nature of book-objects. Breaking away from the cartonera movement-a move-ment typically made up of non-profit collective publishing projects that use recycled materials to make their books-it sought to align itself with independent Mexican publishing houses that reflected on the act of publishing and the book as a medium, such as Alias, Tumbona, or Sur+. As one of La Cleta's members said, their interest in the expendable can be characterized as a rhetorical gesture. This paper analyzes the potentialities and questions La Cleta Cartonera brings to Mexico's publishing mar-ket. Three interviews were conducted for an in-depth perspective of the collective, combined with the examination of various material copies of their books. Finally, the paper takes a theoretical and micro-historical approach to understand La Cleta's project and its rooting in materiality.
The field of audiobook studies has grown substantially in recent years, and now has an increasingly coherent interdisciplinary identity. It draws together con-ceptual and methodological strands from book history, literary studies, and media studies, as well as education and library research. This article offers an overview of existing research in audiobook studies and proposes five pillars for future scholar-ship. Pillar 1, "Locations," considers the audiobook market's simultaneously local, global, and virtual dynamics. Pillar 2, "Infrastructures," looks at the infrastructural systems that shape how audiobooks are created, circulated, and read in the form of platforms, institutions, and individuals and the relationships between them. Pillar 3, "(Non-)commerciality," pays attention to the mixed dynamics of commercial and non-commercial production that characterize audiobooks, including the relationships between audiobooks and talking books produced as accessibility aids. Pillar 4, "Old and new," analyses how audiobooks are both historical and contemporary media: simultaneously the publishing industry's next big thing, and somewhat oldfashioned. Pillar 5, "Practical valorization," engages with the applied and advocacy issues relating to audiobooks' integration into existing systems of valorization and control, including digitization, preservation, remuneration, and regulation. These pillars are offered as inexhaustive examples of research directions that take audio-books on their own terms as material, intermedial, and post-digital instantiations of the book, and consequently support analysis and understanding of how audiobooks intervene in twenty-first century book culture.
This article explores a unique instance of the British state supporting the book trade's global export ambitions for both cultural and commercial motives: the British Book Export Scheme (BES). It chronicles how BES operated as a public-private partnership between the British Council and the book trade to help export British books to nonimperial markets despite the challenges of the Second World War from 1940 to 1951. During the six years at the height of the scheme (1940-1946), BES exported 458,679 pound of British books to more than a score of countries including Brazil, Algeria, and Iran. Yet this unusual balance of cultural and commercial goals proved challenging for government officials and the book trade to reconcile, especially under the pressures of the war, and the scheme was ended in 1951. The article argues that BES's failure as both a cultural and commercial initiative helps us understand why so many subsequent instances of Cold War cultural diplomacy were explicitly noncommercial. BES had shown that it was exceedingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to pursue commercial and cultural imperatives while retaining both state and trade support.
Material texts featuring supplementary attachments-revision slips, edi-tor's notes, newspaper clippings, photographs, or even structural supports for un-easily assembled documents-are certainly familiar to scholars accustomed to the immense variety of textual media. And yet, despite their pervasiveness, these at-tachments have been largely overlooked as a distinct bibliographical category. Set in place by their author or appended at a later date by an intermediary, inscribed supplements command a startling range of appellations: "paste-ins," "paste-ons," "overlays," "enclosures," "patches," "fold-outs," "revision slips," and even "com-posite leaves" or "part-leaves" (among others). This article posits the broadly uni-fying term paste-over as a provisional designation for such objects and examines their use among a handful of manuscripts constructed by three American poets of the nineteenth century: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. As these manuscripts reveal, paste-overs were deployed by these poets not only as an incidental feature of textual revision but as a central constituent of the poem-making process. These glued, taped, pinned, or otherwise adhered supplements modify the written artifact's material architecture-what I call its parastructure. By refocusing interest onto this deceptively simple device, the paste-over emerges as a broadly recognizable object that appears with surprising regularity across material history.
This essay examines the unfolding impact of AI on Australia's trade publishing industry. Currently, AI developers are pursuing an aggressive rollout of their technologies through pre-existing infrastructures. This rollout continues to have varying impacts on different states and industries depending largely on how reliant they might already be on foreign technology and how easily they might be subjected to automation. Using a Digital Anti-Colonial framework (a conceptual framework that centres the role of technology in establishing and maintaining relationships of economic, political, and cultural domination) this essay inquires into the encroachment of AI into terrain traditionally the reserve of Australian trade publishing. After reviewing the unique role of trade publishing in Australia, this essay first analyzes the ways AI is currently being used to automate audiobook production and "summary book" production. It then analyses the use of intellectual property in training AI and the ongoing debate around fair use. This essay argues that the risk posed to the Australian publishing industry by AI is significant. AI threatens to reduce important processes of knowledge creation, evaluation, sharing, and stewardship to one automated process of economic extraction. Unmediated, AI is at odds with Australian trade publishing, which serves important functions in Australian society and culture that go beyond economic accumulation. It is important, therefore, that Australia's trade publishers, industry bodies, and other stakeholders involve themselves in shaping legal frameworks around AI in ways that protect these vital socio-cultural assets.
