What happened to the book? Updates on “Technoprecarious” with University of Michigan

We always look forward to hearing what happens to our past clients and the books we produced together. In May 2019 we headed to Banff National Park in Canada to gather with professors and students from different fields at the University of Michigan to write Technoprecarious, a book on a very prominent topic: the human price of digital capitalism in today’s world. The center dedicated to such studies at the university is the Precarity Lab.

We now got on a call with the organiser and author, Lisa Nakamura, Professor and Director of Digital Studies at the University of Michigan, to get an update on the book and her overall feedback of the experience, one year after the Book Sprint. Lisa told us that

it couldn’t be better timing. The book is open access and is currently in the final stages of production to be published by Penguin, and everyone is very happy with it.

Technoprecarious is also in the production phase at MIT/Goldsmiths, and on pre-sale at Penguin/Random house and on Amazon.

Brainstorming exercise during the Technoprecarious Book Sprint

Lisa also mentioned that the Book Sprint’s collaborative writing method has inspired the participants to produce academic articles faster. Not only can academic articles typically take a long time to be finished and published, they are not usually written collaboratively between peers. This has been changing since the group took part in the Book Sprint. One of the participants has been transferring what he learned to other colleagues and they apply it in their research writings.

Finally, Lisa added:

We approached Book Sprints with no context, we had never known anybody that had done it, so we didn’t know what to expect and it was unbelievable. We could not have written this book without Faith [Bosworth] (the facilitator), there is no way. One thing I really appreciated from the process is that everybody had an equal voice. One participant mentioned he couldn’t tell which ones were his ideas or someone else’s, which is great because then you can really say they are all co-authors.

We couldn’t be happier that the Technoprecarious book is in the process of being published by Penguin, and that the Book Sprint offered useful tools for the participants and their writing.