Abstract

This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amid environments of mass collaboration. (Contains 1 table and 8 notes.)

Citation

Laquintano, T. (2010). Sustained Authorship: Digital Writing, Self-Publishing, and the Ebook. Written Communication, 27(4), 469-493. Retrieved August 7, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/107350/.

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Keywords

• Authors
• Books
• Copyrights
• Economic Factors
• Economic Impact
• Electronic Publishing
• ethnography
• games
• Influence of Technology
• internet
• Investment
• Peer Evaluation
• Publishing Industry
• Self Expression
• Technological Advancement
• Writing for Publication