2024: A Year of Thriving and Flourishing

Financial Solvency & Stability

In many respects, 2024 was a welcome year of stability for punctum books, which is not to say that we weren’t crazy-busy publishing and promoting open access (OA) books and continuing to collaborate with partners around the globe to develop community-led infrastructures for the distribution and discovery of OA books, as well as for the better financial solvency of the newer presses (independent and university-based) who are publishing these books, such as we have been doing for a while now with Thoth Open Metadata and the Open Book Collective. We have always had many irons in the fire and we love to be busy, but it is no exaggeration to say that for a very long time, strategizing around financial sustainability preoccupied us to a more than stressful extent, taking us away from other work that needed our attention and impeding us from launching new projects. Thanks to our Supporting Library Membership Program, however, which we launched in 2019, we now have 120 university library supporters in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, the UK, and the US (see full list HERE):

For the first time in our fourteen-year history, we have reached a threshold of financial stability whereby we have the salaried staff we need to do the work we want to do at a pace that is breathable, everyone is being compensated above academic publishing industry standards, and economic sustainability is no longer something we hope for: it is a reality, especially thanks to the libraries who have decided that investing in community-led Diamond OA book publishing is a vital and valuable wedge against the wholesale commercial privatization (theft) of publicly funded knowledge production and exchange. We don’t believe anyone can actually beat the corporate publishing behemoths at their own game, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create viable, sustainable, and durable alternatives on smaller scales that provide vital benefits to individuals and communities.

Although our own library funding program has been critical to our flourishing, as we’ve stated many times, we believe that the success or lack thereof of the economics of OA book publishing is utterly dependent on mutually supportive collaborations that cross state, national, and international borders, as well as institutional boundaries. The future of OA book publishing should not and cannot be institutionally or regionally insular, which is why we have been collaborating with other publishers, open infrastructure developers, and librarians across the world from 2020 to now, under the auspices of COPIM (Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) and Open Book Futures, to build and manage the Open Book Collective (OBC), which currently raises funds from libraries on behalf of a cooperative of 14 OA publishers (including us) and 4 open infrastructure developers, university-based and independent, in Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK, and the US, and we are also growing this collective year by year. In 2024, more than 75% of our new library memberships were secured via the OBC (the the rest coming to us through our own library program and via Jisc and Lyrasis), and we expect this to be the norm again this year. As our Directors shared in an essay published last year, “Antagonize This! The Empty Signification of ‘Academy-Owned’ Publishing in the Neoliberal University,” if the established players in the landscape of not-for-profit scholarly publishing don’t move beyond the parochialism of traditional legacy academic book publishing, economic feasibility for OA books as well as bibliodiversity is less likely. For punctum, anti-competitive collaboration is key to everything we do, and we think the results so far — both economically and psychically — have been rewarding.

New Partnership: Asterism Books

Another positive highlight of 2024 is that we finally managed to secure a US distributor for our print books, which has long eluded us. While we have had some distribution partnerships in the past, they were always short-lived, had low impact, or were only built around particular titles. A combination of misfortune and serendipity led to our new partnership with Asterism Books, a trade distributor and online bookstore designed, built, and run by independent publishers that currently represents 194 small, independent publishers across the world. Asterism was founded when two small publishers, Joshua Rothes of Sublunary Editions and Phil Bevis of Chatwin Books, stepped into the breach created by Small Press Distribution’s collapse and bankruptcy in March 2024, which left hundreds of small presses in the lurch and threw the literary press community into a severe crisis, especially because SPD, founded in Oakland, California in 1969, had long been considered the premier distributor for small literary presses whose livelihoods depended on SPD’s services. Having a distributor whose mission and ethos is in harmony with ours and who has the trust of the small press community is a real boon for us and we are already seeing a steady uptick in wholesale print book sales. In addition, because Asterism is both a wholesale distributor as well as an online book retailer (a rare entity), we no longer have to direct readers to Amazon to purchase our print books. The fact that one of Asterism’s founding directors, Joshua Rothes, is also one of our authors makes this new partnership even more sweet.

Update: Thoth Open Metadata

As part of the COPIM project, punctum was one of the leading partners in the development of Thoth Open Metadata, a UK-based community interest company. Thoth Open Metadata is currently used by more than 35 publishers worldwide, disseminating metadata to more than a dozen individual repositories and indexes. Thanks to its deployment of Thoth, punctum has been able to constantly expand the reach of its ebook distribution, making sure that its readership continues to grow across the globe. We are currently taking steps to fully integrate Thoth’s cataloguing capabilities into our website, and look forward to its development of a usage metrics interface that in time may replace our current manual system of usage data collection.

“What Are the Stakes of punctum books?”

punctum’s two Directors, Eileen and Vincent, were thrilled to be interviewed in 2024 by punctum author Lette Bragg (The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse) for her newly launched podcast Many Academies, where they talked about the origin and mission of punctum, building community-led infrastructures for the discovery and distribution of OA books, and how to infiltrate existing structures of knowledge production. The interview, “Thinking Out Loud with punctum books,” provides a revealing window into punctum’s mission and ethos vis-a-vis its current projects and future plans. In the same vein, 2024 also witnessed the publication of American Book Reviews’s spotlight on punctum in their Summer 2024 issue.

Publications

In 2024, punctum books published 29 titles on a wide array of subjects, disciplines, and non- or anti-disciplines, including African studies, anti-psychiatry, autotheory (memoir meets scholarly critique), classical studies, critical architecture studies, critical biography, cultural anthropology, disability justice, environmental studies, extrahuman ethnography, film studies, literary fiction & poetry, literary studies, media & technology studies, movement philosophy, neurodiversity, Nubian studies, performance studies, philosophy, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, transqueer studies, security and surveillance studies, critical university studies, and urban ethnography.

Author Spotlight

Our authors were busy and in the spotlight in 2024. Here are some highlights:

• Tedd Siegel, author of Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society, was featured on episode 49 of “The Story Behind the Story” podcast in April 2024. In the same month and as a result of his book’s publication, Tedd was also invited to join the Autonomy Institute as a research fellow. The Autonomy Institute is made up of some of the most important scholars working today on the future of work and post-work in the future economy.

• Cameron McEwan’s book Analogical City, a critical study of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi, was reviewed in May 2024 by Hans van der Heijden in an essay entitled “Think Differently.”

• In April 2024, Mario Telò (Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis and The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now) dialogued with Judith Butler concerning Mario's Bloomsbury book Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler at the Freud Museum in London.

• J.M. Tyree (Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski) was announced as Film Quarterly’s new editor-in-chief.

• Katina Rogers (The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing and Unexpected Flourishing: Growth from Decay in the Mycelial University) edited a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, “On Gathering: Exploring Collective and Embodied Modes of Scholarly Communication and Publishing.”

• “Plant a garden and believe in tomorrow”: Diane R. Weiner reviews Naomi Ortiz’s book Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice for Wordgathering.

• Dorothea Buck’s memoir of her experiences as a victim of Nazi medical experimentation, On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery, translated into English for the first time by Susanne Antonetta and published through punctum’s 3Ecologies imprint, was excerpted for “Mad in America,” a publication dedicated to science, psychiatry, and social justice.

• James Reich, author of Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy, investigated the 2024 Roswell UFO Festival for the Sante Fe Reporter.

• Mildred Faintly reviewed Kidder Smith’s Li Bo Unkempt for 96th of October.

• Mona Radwan, one of the editors of Voices from Nubia: Critical Essays on Contemporary Nubian Literature from Egypt, was interviewed by ArabLit Quarterly.

• A.W. Strouse (author of My Gay Middle Ages, Transfer Queen, Gender Trouble Couplets, and The Gentrified City of God: Queer & Medieval New York from 9/11 to COVID-19) published his article, “The Nonstop Gay Sex Party on the Mexico City Subway,” in The Nation.

• Freddie Mason, author of The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures, appeared in an article in The Guardian on “Breaking the Mould: Jelly Goes from Children’s Favourite to Star Food.”

• Ancillary Review of Books selected James Reich’s Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy as a notable book of 2024.

• Document Journal selected Mariko Nagai’s Irradiated Cities as one of the 33 Top Reads of 2024.

  Author Events

• One Thing Follows Another had a warm welcome in New York, with authors Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte participating in multiple events. On May 3, 2025, they joined choreographers Sally Silvers, Benedict Nguyẽn, Jimena Paz, Kyle Marshall, and Donna Uchizono for a live performance and book launch at Performance Space New York and New York Live Arts. A few days later, on May 7, they took part in a reading and conversation at the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation with Wendy Perron, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Patricia Hoffbauer.

• Author of The Dream-Slaves Darieck Scott spoke with Ianna Hawkins Owen in Side Conversations at UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies on April 22, 2025.

• At Cornell Uniersity’s A.D. White House, Lette Bragg gave a talk, “Writing Otherwise: Toward an Unconventional Academic Career,” on February 20, 2025.

• In Toronto, Another Story Bookshop and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies co-hosted a book launch for Heavy Processing by T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault on January 23, 2025.

• Katina Rogers rang in the new year with a cozy book party for The Presence of Absence on January 30, 2025.

• October 23, 2024 saw a rich evening of poetry and conversation with punctum author Alessandro De Francesco and translator Max Norman, hosted by NYU’s Organism for Poetic Research, the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium, and the Program in Poetics and Theory.

• The night before, on October 22, Printed Matter hosted a reading with Livy Onalee Snyder and Max Norman in celebration of Alessandro De Francesco’s work.

• Jennifer Calkins celebrated the republication of A Story of Witchery on July 12, 2024 at Alienated Majesty Books in Olympia, WA.

• Widening the Scripts: Cultivating Feminist Care launched on April 3, 2024 with a virtual conversation featuring Mariana Prandini Assis, Michelle Forrest, Angela Henderson, and others.

• At Plymouth State University’s Open CoLab, Matthew Cheney and Eileen Fradenburg Joy led an open access teach-in titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Open Access Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask) on April 24, 2024.

• Tedd Siegel, author of Signs of the Great Refusal, joined Jonathan Alexander for a reading and discussion at Page Against the Machine bookstore in Long Beach, CA on February 29, 2024.

Encounters at the End of the Book

Encounters at the End of the Book has continued to evolve and expand beyond its original format of author readings and dialogues. This year, the series embraced a broader range of formats and events—including film screenings, fundraisers, workshops, and experimental performances.

The series remains dedicated to extending the life of books beyond the page, deepening the bonds of relational scholarship and shared imagination, and embodying the transformative power of an open knowledge commons.

• A Reading Fundraiser Crips for ESims for Gaza, bringing together writers in solidarity.

• Douglas Penick reading from Winter Light, his lyrical meditation on aging, mortality, and memory.

• A Fake News Poetry Reading marking the “Second 100 Days,” hosted by Alexandra Juhasz, editor of My Phone Lies to Me.

• A timely and incisive discussion between Tedd Siegel and James Chamberlain on postwork politics and solidarity.

• An engaging dialogue between Katina Rogers and Eric Weiskott, exploring care, collaboration, and institutional transformation.

• A poetic and theoretical encounter between Alessandro De Francesco and Craig Dworkin, reflecting on language, sound, and the limits of textuality.

• A reading party with Naomi Ortiz to celebrate the anniversary of Rituals for Climate Change, where participants shared their favorite poems from the book and closed with a reflective reading prompt (no recording available).

• A double-feature screening and panel, “Lizard Song” and “We Agree on the Sun,” with filmmakers and collaborators Sarah Rosenthal, Dave Rosenthal, Ayana Yonesaka, Jonah Belsky, Johan Casal, and Penina Biddle-Gottesman.

• A reading-performance by Jaym/Jaime del Val*, blurring embodiment, code, and voice.

• A special interview edition featuring contributors to Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions, released in conjunction with the 2024 solar eclipse.

• And a book launch for lauren samblanet’s like a dog, featuring readings by Christy Davids, Brittany Felder, André O. Hoilette, Han Olliver, Ebs Sanders, Oki Sogumi, Lindsey Stark, Julia Kooi Talen, and A.C. Warner.

punctum x Collaborations

In 2024 we started a new series of annual collaborations under the title “punctum x,” each year inviting a queer artist to produce work for us that can be used for conference banners, stickers, bookmarks, book bags, and other outreach paraphernalia for the year. Last year, we did a photo shoot with Luz Magdalena Flores at the Gerber/Hart LGBTQ+ Library and Archives in Chicago.

Community Relations

Supporting Library Membership Program

Our Supporting Library Membership Program, launched in 2019, has grown year after year and has had a more than positive impact upon our operations. We started signing up library members at a fairly good pace in 2019, but because of the pandemic, in 2020 and and early 2021 our library program came, for the most part, to a halt. Towards the middle of 2021 and into 2023 our library program picked up real steam, and by the end of 2024, we had 110 library supporters. So far in 2025, we’ve added 9 new libraries, which means we need to add approximately 20 libraries bewteen now and the end of 2025 to keep pace with progress gained in previous years. In 2022, our goal was to have 200 supporting libraries by the end of 2025, and it now appears that goal is not realistic, but as stated above, we have achieved financial solvency nevertheless, especially thanks to the assistance of the Open Book Collective. Our goal now is to have 25–30 new libraries each year for the next 3 years (2025–2027), at which point we will have the income we need to expand our operations as we see fit without overreaching as “scaling small” is still our motto. By way of showing the growth of our Supporting Library Program, funding raised from libraries was $40,952 in 2020 and in 2024, we raised $326,752.

In addition to our regular supporting library membership program, we also launched in 2023 a library-funded preservation initiative, Special Collections, to republish in newly re-designed print and OA ebook editions the back catalogues of historically significant independent presses founded and run by structurally marginalized persons and groups, whose operations have ceased. Our first publisher is feminist-queer Les Figues Press, founded in 2005 in Los Angeles, who published close to 70 titles include award-winning work that imagines new artistic practices, establishes new theories of literature, and questions the avant-garde alongside the status quo. We partnered with Lyrasis in 2024 to present the Special Collections initiative to libraries for funding: the total cost of republishing the Les Figues catalogue in print and open access ebook editions is estimated at $350,000 and is expected to take 3-5 years. As of now, the program has 4 library supporters who have all pledged 5 years of support for a total of approximately $45,000. As of the end of 2024, 11 titles have been re-published.

Conferences and Connections

Modern Language Association

punctum books attended the 2024 MLA conference in Philadelphia. We enjoyed connecting with our authors in real life and also meeting and conversing with potential new authors. We also shared an exhibits booth this year with our colleague OA publisher Amherst College Press, which afforded us the opportunity to get to know them better.

Midwest Modern Language Association

For the first time, punctum participated in the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) Convention, held November 14–16, 2025, at the Hilton Chicago. This year’s theme, Health in/of the Humanities, resonated with many of punctum’s catalogue, and we were thrilled to meet our authors in person and make new connections with scholars, students, and educators from across the Midwest.

The Charleston Conference

As is usual for punctum, we wore multiple hats at the Charleston Conference, held in Charleston, South Carolina from November 12-14. First, we helped to staff the information booth for the Open Book Collective, THOTH Open Metadata, and Opening the Future in the Vendor Showcase, and we also co-organized a session, “Whose Future Is It? Practical Strategies for Supporting Community-led Open Access Book Publishing,” with the Open Book Collective, which featured librarians from University of California, Santa Barbara Library and The Graduate Center, CUNY. We also helped to organize a social meetup, “COPIM Corner,” for those working and with the COPIM community.

OASPA

punctum books was also present at the 2024 OASPA conference in Lisbon, the first in-person conference for OASPA since the pandemic. Vincent took part in the panel “All Impact, No Factor? How to Assess the Benefits of OA Books and Infrastructure.” This was also the last year of Vincent’s OASPA board membership, having served from 2020–2024, during which time he assisted in guiding the organization to a new, more streamlined management structure and revision of its Statutes.

Open Book Futures

Open Book Futures is the follow-up project of the 2020–2023 COPIM project and entered its second year in 2024. punctum is involved with the project by facilitating the part-time assignments of Livy to the Open Book Collective (OBC) and Vincent to Thoth Open Metadata. The project provides funding to further solidify the financial sustainability and expand the membership of the OBC, as well as to expand the network of publishers depositing metadata records with Thoth Open Metadata while also further developing Thoth’s services, as well as supporting other projects centered on ebook accessibility, experimental publishing, and open archiving.

Open Access Week

To celebrate International Open Access Week 2024, punctum dedicated the week to our author community—sending a postcard of appreciation designed by Vincent to every author in honor of this year’s theme, Community over Commercialization.

Sales and Access

Downloads

In 2024 we fully transitioned to Thoth Open Metadata for the dissemination of our ebooks and their metadata to a host of platforms, repositories, and indexes. While we currently still manually collect the usage data from these sources, we hope that in the future this can be automated, just as with our dissemination.

Downloads & Book Views for 2024

Compared to our 1,011,350 downloads and book views in 2023, we have seen a tremendous uptick in tracked online engagement with our ebooks to 2,578,676 engagements in 2024. AI bots may account for some of this uptick in tracked usage, which of course excludes the many other platforms, servers, and USB drives our open access books may live on!

Readers in every geographical region downloaded our books, with different distributions depending on the platform used to access the materials. We receive country-specific data from JSTOR, Project MUSE, and the Internet Archive:

CrossRef Events

CrossRef Event data reflect moments when the CrossRef API was accessed, for example when a reference with a punctum books DOI was added to a Wikipedia entry. As more websites and databases connect directly to the CrossRef API these data should become more diverse.

Print Sales

In 2024 we continued with average sales numbers per month compared to the previous years. Thanks to our partnership with Asterism Books (detailed above in this report’s introduction), our books are becoming available in an ever-growing network of US bookstores, which is also starting to positively impact overall book sales numbers.

Financial Overview

punctum is a non-profit, public benefit corporation registered in the state of California. All of our revenue is reinvested in our core business: producing widely accessible, high-quality scholarly books.

In 2024, punctum’s revenue continued to develop along the trend of previous years. The greatest part of punctum’s revenue is supporting library memberships (always growing), but another stable part of our income is provided by print book sales via Amazon and other online booksellers, and additionally, via our new US distributor Asterism Books. A small part comes in via reader donations, revolving reader subscriptions, voluntary subventions, and downstream rights.

A considerable number of new libraries have subscribed in 2024 to punctum, in particular through the Open Book Collective, with close to 120 supporting libraries (as of June 30, 2025). We believe growth will continue in 2025, while at the same time we remain vigilant about the impact of government policies in the US and elsewhere on university library budgets. In 2024, we gained a total of roughly 30 libraries and lost 3 libraries, and in 2025 thus far, we have only lost one of our member libraries, which is heartening, but we believe that the next fiscal year (2025-2026) will be more critical relative to the potential fallout of current government policies and reforms. As we have grown our library support, we have also seen a steady drop in voluntary subvention revenues, because an increasing percentage of our authors come from institutions whose libraries support us.

Grant revenue in 2024 was provided solely via punctum books’s participation in the Open Book Futures project, funded by the Arcadia Fund and Research England. This income will increase somewhat in 2025, partially because of some changes in how the funds are managed within the project consortium.

Production costs have stabilized in 2024, as we have moved to a fully salaried payroll system (5 staff members total), with little reliance on external contractors and freelance labor. In 2025 we do not expect to expand our team further as we are consolidating our current production workflow, but we anticipate adding 1-2 more salaried staff within 3-5 years (in the areas of creative direction and production/design).

Similarly, tax expenses have remained stable since 2023 and we expect these to remain stable for the foreseeable future. We have been able to reduce our travel expenses as the work for the COPIM grant project came to a close mid-2023, and do not expect any large changes in travel expenses in the near future. Since punctum books is a 100% work-from-home company, and we don’t rent office or warehouse space, we and our staff leave a minimal carbon footprint (admittedly, in order to produce and distribute print books alongside OA ebooks, we partner with some companies, such as Amazon and Ingram, whose carbon impacts are much larger and over which we can exert no control).

Punctum Menagerie

December brought the addition of two new rescue kittens, Freddie and Flossie, to punctum’s base camp in Santa Barbara, California.