This article examines three international conferences within the field of book and publishing studies. The origins of the first date back to 1993, following the establishment of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in 1991. While SHARP has gradually expanded its thematic scope over the years, it remains firmly anchored in the traditions of book history. The Common Ground (CG) and By the Book (BTB) conferences—established a decade and over two decades later, in 2003 and 2014, respectively—reflect a more contemporary orientation, engaging with the publishing industry through media- and business-oriented frameworks and drawing on disciplines such as sociology, library and information science, and management. A total of 6481 papers were presented at the conferences analysed. The events attracted 4268 speakers out of 5407 attendees from seventy-nine countries and over 1200 academic and research institutions. The majority of individuals were affiliated with institutions in high-income and/or English-speaking countries. Regions with the least representation included South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. A mere 3 per cent of the attendees participated in at least two of the conferences under study. The SHARP conference is identified as the largest in the field, Common Ground as a medium-scale event—though operating at a smaller scale in recent years — and BTB as a small-scale conference. The most cohesive communities formed around BTB and SHARP, where returning speakers accounted for just over and just under 30 per cent of contributors, respectively, and their papers comprised over 50 per cent of all presentations at each conference.
Kamila Augustyn (Fri,) studied this question.