Serendipitous Discoveries
How Self-Published Content Reaches the Public Library
Philosophische Fakultät
When the e-book reader was popularized in the late 2000s, the book industry as a whole
soon had to adapt to mass readership of e-books. The rise of the e-book also meant the
rise of new sources of content – in particular, digitally self-published works. In the United
States, public libraries quickly established cooperative infrastructures that offered patrons
standardized access to self-published e-books. These new library infrastructures were
developed in the hopes of fostering a greater democratization of public writing and reading,
and also had far-reaching consequences for library licensing practices until the present day.
Based on a series of interviews with pioneers involved in the process of bringing self-published
content into the public library, this work is a contribution to early internet studies and traces
the emergence of innovative digital infrastructures in the public library.
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