Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing is a three-part research and scoping report which serves as a resource for the scholarly community, especially for authors and publishers interested in pursuing more experimental forms of book publishing.

The first two parts of this report situate experimental books in the context of academic research and publishing, and map current experiments as part of a typology of experimental books. The third part of this report reviews existing resources on tools, platforms, and software used in the production of experimental books. This section also presents a roadmap and methodology towards the creation of an online resource (which we will be creating in 2022) and discusses collaborative writing and annotation tools.

This report has or will be published in an experimental way itself. Making use of the advanced versioning functionalities that PubPub offers, we will be iteratively updating this document over the next two years, thus allowing us to incorporate user feedback and new technological developments. We very much welcome feedback on the report. Please feel free to add comments and feedback to the PubPub version directly, or contact us at wp6@copim.ac.uk

The report is available here in the form of a PubPub book, while a PDF version is available from Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4471571.

WP6 is also producing a set of pilot cases of experimental books (including by ScholarLed presses Open Humanities Press and Mattering Press), which will make use of and try out the technologies and workflows mentioned in the report. We will be documenting the development of these pilot cases throughout this year on the COPIM Blog.