On 12 January 2026, from 4:15 to 6:30 p.m., Prof. Dr. Annette Gilbert will give her Fellow Lecture on the topic of “‘We believe this work is culturally important’ – Reprints in the field of tension between commercialisation and public benefit” (in German, location: Room 201, Philosophikum, Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster).

The lecture focuses on the contemporary reprint industry, which claims to be committed to cultural heritage and has made it its mission to make it (re)accessible: “We believe this work is culturally important, and [...] have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide,” is a frequent refrain in the blurb. However, this noble cause all too often conceals a business model that takes advantage of the mass retro-digitisation driven by Google & Co., which has made countless public domain works available again, allowing them to be (re)commercialised with little effort. In doing so, they are not only profiting from the fruits of others’ labour. Given the lack of quality control in fully automated production processes, they also damage the works they claim to be saving.

Prof. Dr. Annette Gilbert is a literary scholar and academic director at the Department of German and Comparative Literature at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She researches mediality and materiality as well as the social and (infra-)structural conditions of literature with a focus on avant-garde and experimental literature.