The story of digital publishing in Writing Studies is one of innovation, collaboration, and do-it-yourself spirit. The field's digital publication venues emerged alongside the birth of the World Wide Web, and scholars used those venues to experiment with the possibilities of publishing in digital spaces. Visionary editors built journals with just a university server and a call for papers, and that creative spirit expanded the form and possibilities of scholarly communication. This article extends that work through the concept of “reader-choice publishing,” an approach that privileges reader needs and preferences by distributing scholarly texts in multiple open formats: HTML, PDF, and EPUB. Through a reader-choice approach, writers and publishers ask, “How will the reader use this text?” “What affordances do they need?” “What tradeoffs will they accept, and how might a single text be offered in multiple ways to offset those tradeoffs as the reader's needs and contexts change?” This article situates the reader-choice approach alongside a history of digital publishing in the field, acknowledging the past while pointing to a more usable future.

This webtext focuses on Lockridge's production of Rhetorlist, an inventory of new books published in Rhetoric and Writing, Composition Studies, Technical Communication, and related disciplines. Tracing the histories and challenges of these disciplines' engagement with digital tools, Lockridge argues for an attention to small, meaningful projects of service to field, and offers strategies for the development of such projects.