Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20190928203157/@comment-6032121-20191003212747

First and most importantly, what User:Bwburke94 said. All our rules currently say about what counts as an "official release" is that something's officially released when it has been made available to the public in a commercial format. If you want to add more clauses to what kind of publisher does or does not count (I'm using "publisher" in the wide sense of "entity which legally publishes things", not the narrow legalese sense you outlined above), that is a wholly other debate, but in the meantime, Tardis:You are bound by current policy. As far as this debate is concerned, nothing in Tardis's rules prohibits self-publishers.

Second, please explain why whether its publishings in a repository of data called Books in Print should have any bearings on discussion on an online publisher. (Whether you like it or not, webnovels and ebooks are a major part of what literature is in the modern world. You can't just say something's not a "proper" book because it doesn't exist in print.)