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.

I'm glad that I read the outline so...

[jj_johny]

I don't have to buy the book. Not that its not a bad idea its just another one of those "here is this story that points out this fact or direction or whatever". Not that these aren't entertaining if the writer is good (i.e The New New Thing was good) but it really is like reading a newspaper put into a book. (And if wanted that I would buy the Onion's century in review.) And these get oh so stale. I cringe at some of the drivel that still is sitting on book shelves at the local B&N or Borders about new technology that is so wrong, dated and such a waste of paper.

Hope the best for the author but I will not be buying it.

And why put out a book when you have perfectly good web publishing tools, money perhaps??? So for all the talk in the outline about news being different on the web, its really not for the authors - weblog != money for authors.

Dead Tree Blog

[stanmann]

The real question is, how many people will pay to read what basically amounts to a Paper bound version of slashdot. Understandably, everyone who contributes will want a copy in order to see his name mentioned in the contributors section, but will this be particularly profitable for O'Reilly otherwise?

great plan

[Photon01]

These guys at must be geniuses:

1. Get loads of idiots online to collaborate on a book
2. Publish book
3. Idiots from (1.) will want to buy the book they are in ....
4. Profit!!!!

PS. is it just me or is slashdot very slashdotted today?

You write and he takes the money?

[watzinaneihm]

Hmmm...
I wouldnt mind contributing but what do I get for it? Looks lkike I still will have to buy the books to get any info.
I rather like the Bruce Eckel [mindview.net] model, he publishes the book online, anybody can contribute online(though your contributions might not make it to the paper version), and you only have to pay if you want a paper copy of the book. Almost like GPL.The end result does look good.
Or maybe the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] model More like BSD license.

collaboration is good.

[firewort]

re-posted because I missed catching URL errors in preview. DOH.

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 [lulu.com], a new site founded by Bob Young, formerly of RedHat [redhat.com]. 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.

Re:Will bad ideas ever stop being implemented?

[Oscar_Wilde]

I might have miss read that but do you mean to say that helping produce a book/reference without being paid is stupid? What about the joy of knowing that you've helped further other peoples knowledge?

Better tell the Wikipedians [wikipedia.org] that they are suckers before they waste any more of their time.