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Yesterday, Mark Sample lead an interesting conversation on Twitter with @kfitz, @eymand, and @JenHoward on the possibility of setting up a “digital-based indie academic press.”

Today, he elaborated:

I was riffing on these ideas yesterday on Twitter, asking, for example, what’s to stop a handful of of scholars from starting their own academic press? It would publish epub books and, when backwards compatibility is required, print-on-demand books. Or what about, I wondered, using Amazon Kindle Singles as a model for academic publishing. Imagine stand-alone journal articles, without the clunky apparatus of the journal surrounding it. If you’re insistent that any new publishing venture be backed by an imprimatur more substantial than my “handful of scholars,” then how about a digital humanities center creating its own publishing unit?

So, I’m thinking…why don’t we do this? I’d like to use the THATCamp spirit (hacking before yacking, collaboration, digital forms of communication) to try to imagine what a digital indie academic press (or UnPress) would look like. Would it feature articles? Online conferences? Hacking sessions? Multimodal presentations? Could we institute peer-to-peer review? When would we publish?

There are lots of productive questions and conversations that could come out of a session like this. But, ideally, I’d like to leave the session with the beginnings of a plan for some kind of indie press associated (in some way) with THATCamp.