Making The News - In the Age Of The Internet

A reader writes:"Dan Gillmor has just published a column on his weblog about creating a collaborative book with his readers. The outline/full details are on his page - O'Reilly will be publishing the book." Dan and I spoke briefly about this - it's semisimilar to what Slashdot did with Jane's Intelligence Review - which turned out well.

Re:Open Source Book writing/collaboration tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is! http://cwriter.org

Collaboration: good. Lulu.com

[firewort]

Collaboration is a good thing. It's the foundation of things like the Free Software movement, and Open Source movement. It's how performers make good music.

Arguably, it also produces a lot of trash, but hey, there's a market for that, too.

The interesting thing here is that O'Reilly is taking this up with Gillmor. Not everyone can get published by O'Reilly, so what's a regular guy to do? Use Lulu.com, a new site founded by Bob Young, formerly of RedHat [slashdot.org]. You register as an author, and your collaborators register as an author, and you can all submit chapters to each other's books for collaboration. Then you can set price for online, print, or cd distribution, collecting an 80% royalty. No other publishing deal I know of sets an 80% royalty to the author.

Or choose no royalty and set the price for online distribution to free. Books can be published under any license you like, just place the copyright page with the license you like in the book when you upload it.