Since the advent of Internet, I am seeing some shift, be it slowly towards more fluid, experimental book publishing.
1. Open access electronic access are becoming more and more available
2. some authors are selling their electronic format using gift economy method
3. As traditional publishing company takes nearly 9 months to publish a book, people are self-publishing using simple services like gumroad, or book publishing services like leanpub
4. some others are involving the commons, or at least their paid users in process of writing their books. e.g., Robert Right, Stewart Brand's maintenance, David Chapman, Ted Joya and others. Substack have started some interesting revolution.
5. and this is wildly under-appreciated, many wikibooks, libre texts and books on open press are collaboratively created, meaning there is no single authors.
6. authors Like Tyler Cowen and Reid Hoffman uses AI to collaborate on ideas, publication or interactivity.
https://econgoat.ai/en
https://www.impromptubook.com/
and all this is very interesting to me.
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@weirdwriter love to know your thoughts as welll since you are quite familiar with books distribution and ##openPublishing