This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article 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 amid environments of mass collaboration.

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