I have a particular penchant toward the self-published.

You see, I grew up with printed pages still warm from a Kinko’s copy machine. I was taught with manifestos stapled sideways, printed in perfect punk-rock attitude and do-it-yourself aesthetic. A girl who was awash with the unspoken mission statement of “anyone-can-do-it” chanted by movements like Riot Grrrl and Act-Up, I learned that you didn’t have to hit the New York Times Best Seller List to be considered an author. I learned that, given time, a typewriter, and some dimes for the copy machine, you could print your own stories, your own news, and your own ideas. I learned that my voice and thoughts counted. I learned the magic of self-publishing.

So it’s no wonder that when I went to teach for the first time, I was influenced by pedagogical tactics that pushed for decentralizing knowledge. When setting up our reading list, I worked hard to use anthologies, collect stories from multiple voices, and use small-press books by relatively unknown authors.

Moreover, I wanted the texts we read to exist outside of the echo chamber that can be created in academia. The feedback of one text calling to another, that text calling to a next, all reverberating until the topic at hand is buried beneath layers of rhetoric. I wanted fresh views, even if the topics we were discussing were well known. I wanted my students to hear the poetry in knowledge, the lyricism in all our different epistemologies. So, I brought them zines, written by local authors, and even brought in my thesis, which a friend of mine had formatted into a folded-in-half, 8”-by-11” zine. Basically, I wanted my students to tap into a more creative, yet still academic means of learning.

But now? Now, I’m a little worried. What will happen to the self-published when we all go paperless? It’s hard not to hear the clamor of eBooks and digital readers, let alone not see them in the hands of all the morning commuters. I’ve heard all about how libraries across the country are digitizing their catalogs; I’ve seen how the old paperback novel is now kindling the fires of online eBook sales. It’s hard not to see that every nook of the Internet is saturated by the phenomenon.

But, for a girl like me? A girl who not only self-publishes her work, but is a hopeless consumer of zines and small-press works, well, I worry about the impact on small-press and indie authors when we go fully digital and paperless.

But there is hope. If you search the Internet a little bit, multiple web-based zine libraries are popping up, all with digitized archives ready to be downloaded and consumed. (If you’re interested, check out the list of zine archives from zinebook.com.) For indie authors, Smashwords.com is the place to go, with its wide selection of self-published eBooks. And then, of course, there is Apple’s release of iBook Author, the Mac-based application that allows anyone to create their own multi-touch textbooks. So, suffice it to say, at the moment, there seems to be space still for the self-published, ready and waiting to fill your digital bookshelf.