Serendipitous Discoveries

Abstract

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.