ebr@30 marks three decades of experimental, open-access publishing at the electronic book review—a journal shaped not by market incentives or institutional mandates, but through the distributed labors of a community thinking in and with networks.
Launched in 1995 by Joseph Tabbi and Mark Amerika, in conversation with Ronald Sukenick and other figures of experimental fiction and theory, ebr grew out of early affiliations with Alt-X and Black Ice magazine, operating at the intersection of the literary avant-garde and emergent internet culture. From its beginnings in static HTML and hand-coded essays, the journal became a laboratory for editorial improvisation, digital poetics, and interface as critique—drawing writers, artists, and scholars into sustained, transdisciplinary dialogue.
As digital culture shifted through the rise of social media and platform-driven publishing in the 2000s, ebr maintained a parallel, non-corporate model of intellectual exchange—marked by threads, glosses, ripostes, and a collaborative editorial model that welcomed reader-writers known as weavers. Anne Burdick’s "writing space design" approach treated interface as an epistemic medium, shaping successive versions of the site—from single-themed issues to nonlinear, metadata-rich networks. Through the efforts of designer-developer Ewan Branda, these versions evolved through ebr 1.0 (1996), 2.0 (1998), 3.0 (2000), and 4.0 (2007), reflecting transformations in both web architecture and editorial practice.
Today, in an era increasingly shaped by generative AI and algorithmic culture, ebr continues to interrogate what it means to write, read, and edit critically in digital space. As articulated in recent interviews, the journal functions less as a destination than as an incubator—fostering thought across disciplines, generations, and geographies. Contributors describe ebr as a space of mentorship, play, and shared intellectual risk: where ideas not yet shaped for institutional approval can be cultivated in dialogue with others.
This site gathers interwoven histories from across the archive—video interviews, interface experiments, marginal glosses, and theoretical thREADs—mapping a rhizomatic editorial ecology. It traces a movement from early web bricolage to multimodal, annotated engagements with the born-digital. Not to celebrate a brand, but to document a different kind of digital history: one shaped by affinity, critique, and what Lori Emerson calls “the difference that makes a difference” in digital writing.
Now supported by the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, ebr sustains its founding ethos while expanding its global reach. With renewed attention to accessibility, feminist and postcolonial frameworks, and the changing role of critique in AI-mediated environments, ebr@30 continues to resist the logics of platform culture, keeping the question of collaborative literary futures radically open.
This site was designed and built by Will Luers with assistance of ChatGPT.
Photos and emphemera were provided by Joseph Tabbi, Scott Rettberg and Ewan Branda.
Zoom interviews with Joe Tabbi, Lai-Tze Fan, Tegan Pyke, Anna Nacher, Ewan Branda, Davin Heckman, Lori Emerson, Steve Tomasula, Rob Wittig, Scott Rettberg and Mark Amerika were conducted by Will Luers and Joseph Tabbi and edited by Will Luers.