Back in May of 2000, I received the following email at UbuWeb:
I really enjoyed your site. It is very funny and made me think about different cultures other than the ones i experience daily living in a small texas town. –Meredith
It succinctly summed up everything that I had wished to achieve with UbuWeb (founded in 1996): that of a distribution point for out of print, hard-to-find, small run, obscure materials, available for free from any point on the globe. Although the technologies of the web are continually changing, at UbuWeb, we're sticking with the distributive paradigms of the original web as our modus operandi. Good content will always be good content, regardless of the technologies that may in some ways "enhance" or make it more "interactive." We are less interested in radical uses of technology than we are in underscoring the potential for radical distribution, using the web as it is.
This paper will describe the growth trajectory of UbuWeb from its inception to the present and will present the ways in which the site has resounded to a variety of issues: