Sustained Authorship: Digital Writing, Self-Publishing, and the Ebook

This dissertation is a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. It focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of thirteen ebooks self-published by online poker players. The dissertation advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amidst environments of mass collaboration.;Working from the perspective of writing studies, the dissertation weds ethnographic data collection with grounded theory analysis to create a theory of sustained authorship, a concept that accounts for the literate activity that supports self-publishing as writers manage the production and distribution of their ebooks. The data was collected over a period of two years and includes web texts such as discussion forums, blog posts, and websites, as well as interview data from participants such as writers, editors, and contributors to the ebooks. The core of the dissertation addresses how the dynamics of digital environments manifest themselves in the composing lives of ebook authors. The first chapter provides the framework and methodology. Chapter two documents how writers manage textual production without the help of formal publishers. Chapter three argues that when writers work without recourse to law, localized intellectual property regimes surface in the literate activity that supports textual distribution. Chapter four examines peer review processes that lend credibility to ebooks, and the conclusion broadens the analysis and concentrates on the significance of self publishing for the "future of the book."...