PUBLISHING

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cut-up methods, and generative art or appropriation art methodologies.
(An early example is the Yes Men’s appropriation of the World
Trade Organization website, for which they used a self-designed
software tool which automatically modified the content of the mirrored
pages to suit to the Yes Men’s own subversive purposes. The
same could be done with electronic books.)
An artists’ blog such as those found on Tumblr can quite easily be
turned into an artists’ electronic book. (Elizabeth Castro: Catalan-
Talk – Publishing multilingual interviews, from Twitter to ebooks to
paper)
Some artists have based their work on distribution processes such as
Pirate Bay-style file sharing: existing books are scanned and quickly
converted into downloadable ebooks, with an emphasis on spreading
and on alternative ways of networking (such as person-to-person
exchange of files on flash drives).
Electronic artists’ books can be based on experimentation with
existing easy-to-use authoring apps and online authoring platforms
such as The People’s E-Book or KYUR8.
Proprietary authoring tools and distribution platforms such as Apple’s
iBooks Author can be used out of pragmatic considerations (as
pioneered by Paul Chan’s artists’ book publishing house Badlands
Unlimited). However, this will greatly limit the scope of distribution
as well as the long-term readability of the project, as was the case
with CD-ROM and Flash multimedia books in the past.
Other standard file formats creatively used and abused as document
formats for visual books include: animated GIF graphics files for the
digital equivalent of flip books, MP4 video files displaying a book
with pages that turn by themselves, MP3 audio files triggering abstract
art on the volume meter display of an audio player, JPEG files
with encoding artifacts of corrupted bits, etc. 5 Such files are relatively
easy to create, and there are substantial communities of artists/
designers actively working with such media. However, in most cases,
the resulting works will only be viewable in web browsers, not on
e-reader devices and applications. They also cannot be distributed
through electronic bookstores.
Self-contained HTML/HTML5; using Pandoc, it is possible to store an
HTML file and all its images and style sheets as one single, large file.
5 Used as a medium of artistic experimentation among by various artists and designers, including net artists
since the 1990s, and also by the conceptual poet and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith.
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