The electronic book review Editorial Team discusses electronic book review's 30th anniversary, the journal's position at the junctures of multiple academic disciplines, the threat of an increasingly turbulent global stage, and the aspiration to continue providing a home for a future defined by resistance and unity.
2025 marks the 30th anniversary of ebr – electronic book review, a journal that over three decades has served as an essential platform for discussions and debates on electronic literature and digital culture. Founded in 1995 by Joseph Tabbi and Mark Amerika, since its inception ebr has been available as an online, open-access venue fostering a dialogue and supporting “critical writing produced and published by the emergent digital literary network.” (About, ebr’s website). Not only has electronic book review repeatedly served as a scene of groundbreaking theoretical propositions (such as the collection of essays on postdigitality, an extensive debate on cybertext, an ecocritical thematic section on natural media, a thread on critical code studies and – most recently – on AI and digital writing), but the journal has been consistently offering new formats of critical interventions and academic exchange, such as riPOSTes, thREADs, essay gatherings, and editorial glosses. All of them are based on the idea of ebr’s intertext, in “contrast to the decontextualized and ahistorical approach to presenting essays” in outlets such as Academia, ResearchGate, and such like (Fan 2023). ebr, circa 2025, is now in the process of gathering contributions whose authors (or readers) have self-consciously linked their own essays with others in the ebr archive, encouraging what can be described as an historical intertext.
Our journal can be considered a form of tactical publishing (Ludovico 2023), yet another instance to shape electronic literature as a caring and careful community of practice (Wenger 1998; Rettberg 2009), and a deliberate strategy to continue the best communitarian practices known for ages as the very backbone of the humanities “defined through a trail of commentaries, ripostes, and (what is a sure sign of scholarly success) further work.” (Tabbi 2017). It is precisely this work of “relocating the literary” into “networks, knowledge bases, global systems, material and mental environments” (Tabbi 2017) that electronic book review has pursued over its three decades.
In 2025, we are seeking to respond to both the ever-shifting, turbulent, and increasingly unstable circuits of the academic humanities along with the equally transforming and transformative scene of electronic literature (e-lit), 30 years after ebr has been established as a regular publishing outlet for e-lit. To that end, we would like to invite the whole community to reflect on what has been and what is still ahead of us (possibly, in the decades to come).
This month we did not publish our regular content, but invite you to explore our vast archive instead. It is available under “essays” and “gatherings” tabs of the website. We especially recommend revisiting a debate on cybertext – one of the fundamental and foundational concepts in our area. In the upcoming months we will be introducing new formats and new ideas: refreshed riPOSTes, interviews as a form of oral history of our field, and short reviews of particular works of electronic literature. We are aware of all the pressures in academic world and beyond - in other realms of theory and practice that matter to develop a healthier, more resilient, and more robust digital culture that extends beyond the pure instrumentality, emotional turmoil, and mental instability spreading across the platformized internet, not unlike tragic wildfires.
Starting next month we are simplifying the process of submitting to electronic book review with the help of a new editorial management system (BOAP, a local version of Open Journal System). ebr will not change on its front end, but we hope to make our editorial work smoother and more transparent. Some types of submission (articles, as opposed to book reviews, essays, and interviews) undergo a double blind peer-review and we take care to provide valuable and sensitive feedback to all our authors, which – under current circumstances in the academy at large and the massive workloads falling upon all of us involved in it – takes time, patience and energy.
We continue to tend to this space as a wild garden of electronic creativity in ways that benefit the whole community. However, we will not be able to do this on our own. We do hope to have your back in this endeavor, dear ebr authors, practitioners, and readers. Please send us your contributions, thoughts, and comments – long and short, coded or not, AI-generated or not, cutting-edge forward-looking or not, re-using our archives or not. Let’s celebrate 30 years of ebr together.
Joseph Tabbi, Anna Nacher
& Tegan Pyke, Daniel Johannes Flaten Rosnes, and Jasmine Mattey
Bibliography
Fan, Lai-Tze. “ebr Historical Intertext.” Electronic Book Review, 5 Nov. 2023, https://doi.org/10.7273/7xwn-0h05.
Ludovico, Alessandro. Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century. MIT Press, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. “Communitizing Electronic Literature.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2, 2009.
Tabbi, Joseph. “Relocating the Literary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Material, and Mental Environments.” CounterText, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3366/count.2017.0074.
Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1998.