Founded as an academic print publication by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa in 2000, the Cybertext Yearbook has been freely available online in PDF since 2007, when the last issue was published. With a media-independent approach on the agenda, the editors pursue the theory and terms put forth by Espen Aarseth in his 1997 book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature." For seven years, practitioners, developers, designers, users, critics, and scholars participated in this broadly designated field of digital textuality and contributed controversial perspectives to a lively conversation across textual traditions that covers hypertexts, Multiple User Dungeons (MUD's), "transfiction","holopoetry", and computer games. Among other platforms, e.g. on the first four Digital Art and Culture conferences (1998-2001) and on the Web, these discussions took place on two online venues: in the electronic book review (ebr) and on the grand text auto blog http://grandtextauto.org/2005/08/12/clarifying-ergodic-and-cybertext/. A starting point was Nick Montfort´s review on Espen Aarseth´s "Cybertext" that appeared on the ebr´s „electropoetics“ thread in 2000 http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates.
All issues of the yearbook were converted to the database that contains a total of 53 articles grouped into browsable topics: "ergodic literature", "games", "history", and "theory". The Cybertext Yearbook is known as a platform for culturally diverse mindsets: In the 2006-issue on "Ergodic Histories" it gave voice to scholars examining, for example "German Proto-Cybertexts from the Baroque Era to the Present" (Joergen Schaefer); Catalan "ergodic suites of visual poetry by Joan Brossa" (Joan-Elies Adell) or the "Nonlinearity in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Poetry" by the Finnish researcher Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila.
The yearbook was founded at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä and has no ISSN. While no papers were published in 2008 and 2009, an issue that contains articles on Polish literary history was released in 2010.