Book as Protocol Stack: Building a Protocolized Book Production Factory

TalkJenna DixonSeptember 23, 2026

Jenna Dixon presents an in-progress 'book-production factory' that reframes book publishing as a protocol stack: a structured transmittal handshake between author and factory, styles treated as controlled vocabulary separating meaning from appearance, a conformance-checking preflight step, and a deterministic pipeline yielding multiple faithful output formats (.epub, print PDF) from one source. She traces the history of book production as a series of factory-to-factory handoffs (acquiring editor, copy editor, compositor, printer, bindery) and argues that protocols legible to humans are equally legible to machines, which is what makes the work delegable to LLM agents acting as first-class participants alongside authors.

Topics

conformance-checked-preflight deterministic-multi-format-pipeline memory protocols styles-as-controlled-vocabulary symposium-2026 technology transmittal-handshake versioned-series-templates-as-inheritable-protocols

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