The multilingual Theory on Demand (ToD) book series was initiated by our Amsterdam-based research centre, the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), back in 2009, five years after its founding. The main reason for this were the increased costs to publish paper books with established publishers in the Netherlands, like NAi and Valiz, that have demanded in the past up to 20.000 euro per title in subsidies in order to make it economically viable to edit/translate, design, print and distribute a book, including the overhead of the publishing house with paid staff, rent, etc.—money to be organized by the authors, together with the INC. After the right-wing Rutte government implemented a budget cut of 50% in culture and arts during the post-2008 austerity wave, it became all but impossible for an applied science institution like the Hogeschool of Amsterdam (where INC is based) to apply for cultural grants. From now on funding in arts and education were firmly separated by an apartheid wall, aimed at ‘separate development’ of the two, once close sectors. In the cultural sector, even more than in the past, it’s state-controlled funds that decide which books are going to be published in the Netherlands. INC was thus forced to investigate ‘free’ digital publishing formats as ‘academic’ research grants were unwilling to finance free-floating theory publications. The other implication of this model is the increased dependency of the entire sector on free or cheap interns.

The philosophy of the ToD series was—and still is—relatively simple. Instead of pretending to be a full-fledged publishing house, the INC was going to do publishing experiments in a serialized form. In this way, technical knowledge could be transferred from one generation of staff and students to the next, which is all but impossible with on-off publications. Initially Margreet Riphagen set up the series, working together with the designer Katja van Stiphout, who is still designing the ToD book covers. Miriam Rasch also considerably contributed to the further development of the series, as have Sepp Eckenhaussen and Tommaso Campagna lately. Initially, the series offered a pdf version, a print-on-demand option to purchase a paper copy via lulu and the dispersion of the content via a variety of so-called web readers (such as Issuu). The rise of e-readers and smartphones urged us to start to experiment with the e-pub format (which was later on dissolved and integrated into the HTML5 standard). In the early years of the e-book separate version had to be made—and tested—for readers such as Kindle (Amazon), Kobo and others.

The experiences of staff, designers, programmers, writers and interns are stored in an internal manual plus a separate one for authors. Over the years, three generations have worked to refine the ‘markdown’ workflow. Sometimes, ToD titles are printed in small quantities, like 200 or 500, when funding for this has been available. In such a case, the INC would distribute these paper books for free, worldwide, via the postal service, much like is still happening in the case of its oldest series, the INC readers. Different from most others, the INC is not collecting data about downloads, views, likes on social media etc. As one of the first research centres in the world, INC declared itself data-free. Publications are gifts to the universe, in the spirit of Adilkno’s description of sovereign media that have emancipated itself of any possible audience (and its deadly boring statistics). The impact and ranking logic in academia has all but destroyed stylistic diversity and literary experimentation and led to a bureaucratic monoculture, aimed at eliminating all modes of critical and speculative thinking.

Three Dutch applied sciences grants have so far helped to finance the further development of the Theory on Demand series: the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit (2013-2014), which resulted in the e-pub manual with the same name, Making Public , which produced the Urgent Publishing Toolkit (2018-2020) and Going Hybrid (2022-23), which introduced a broader multi-media ‘expanded publishing’ approach, including online video and podcasting as grown-up, stand-alone publishing practices. In all these projects, the collaboration with the Rotterdam art academy Willem de Kooning, has been intense, in particular with Florian Cramer, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh and their Experimental Publishing (XPUB) master degree.

Editor: Geert Lovink