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 academics, are writers, citers, submitters, readers, editors, reviewers and quality-control accreditors.13 That scholars are often the only primary target audience as a readership for these objects is lamentable but also renders their involvement all the more central. Collins notes that most studies of the monograph to date have ‘focus[ed] upon researchers’.14 I contend that there is good cause for this.

The fundamental idea of the monograph is that it provides the necessary greater space to work through, and in which to present enough evidence for, an argument than is possible in a journal article. The standard has evolved to the 80,000 word mark in many disciplines because it is a well-known fact that academics must be told when to stop speaking. However, various experiments with the form’s length have been undertaken in the last thirty years. For instance, Ken Wissoker notes that Duke University Press published a range of short-form books in the mid-nineties at the behest of book shops, who felt that ‘somebody who wasn’t an academic might read something that was 125 pages while they wouldn’t read the 300 page version’. Wissoker then extends this line of thinking to note that ‘Presses have been interested in having shorter forms – and having a variety of forms – for a long time. And with the digital, if you take out the production part, you should be able to accommodate a whole range of lengths, including much longer things than would ﬁt into a book.’15

It is in this historicised light that Palgrave Macmillan has also recently launched its ‘Pivot’ programme, featuring original research at approximately the 30,000 word mark (but not described as a monograph). This programme, according to Hazel Newton, ‘seeks to challenge the assumption that research could only be published at these [80,000 word] lengths’ and is made possible by developments in technology that eliminate the previous constraints of ‘the practicalities and costs of printing, binding and paper’.16 This is, in many ways, fascinating, because it demonstrates how the commercial histories and constraints of technology may continue to bear upon the way in which ideas are communicated between scholars, even in the age of the internet. We are, after all, historically conditioned subjects. Taking this to an extreme and depending upon how one thinks about the interaction between writing and thinking, there is also the possibility that such space constraints – engendered by historical