I’ve been thinking a little about personal content management systems (like weblogs and wikis), and how emerging tools and publishing paradigms might drive change in traditional publishing processes. Example: My last two books were done with co-authors, and while I lurv my co-authors, coordinating with them was often less than optimal. I suspect the reason for this is because the medium of exchange of information in the publishing world is (still!) a Microsoft Word document. I think Word is just fine if you’re developing documents intended for print, but Word documents are an information silo. Also, Word’s markup, collaboration and comment features suck, and the ability to do version control with it are nonexistent. If you’re doing a technical book containing code examples, it opens up a whole new can of worms (like, what happens if you change code in Chapter 7 that depends on the outcome of an example you did in Chapter 3?).
Using Word to do a book with two authors (plus an editorial team comprised of a development editor, copy editor, indexer, and so forth) is hard enough. I shudder to think how Wrox, with their just-in-time editorial delivery system and dozens of authors per title, were able to pull this off? (Apparently some aspect of their model must not have worked, because they’re out of business now.)
Big open-source projects like Mono and Mozilla can scale up with dozens or hundreds of contributors, why not publishing projects? I wonder if you could take lessons from the way that print media is managed to scale the process of technical book-authoring to many dozens or even hundreds of contributors? Could you use something like CityDesk to do this, I wonder? Or are tools not really the issue?
Related posts:
No Comments so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.