Why To Make a Book Open Source

Charlie Leadbeater gives some pretty good reasons why writing a book the open source way is the right method. His thoughts below:
As I was researching and writing We-think over the past eighteen months and more, it became increasingly evident that I could not write a book about collaborative creativity in a traditional way. Seems odd then not to apply that thinking to the book itself.

That is why – with the full support of my publishers at Profile – I have released the first 11 chapters of the book in draft form before its formal and physical publication, planned for summer 2007. Its available from my website and as a wiki at we-think.wikia.com

I’ve added the start of an A-Z of We-Think style initiatives, more content will appear over Christmas, including a list of rejected titles and the next draft, the one that will go to the printers, will be up perhaps in February.

It’s perhaps too early to say whether this little experiment in collaborative creativity has been a success or not but I’ve certainly learned a lot from it.

I would definitely adopt an open approach to writing my next book but I would do it slightly differently.

For one I’d start earlier. Some of the original material for We Think was written two years ago, so its on the verge of its sell by date. I would do more to share the early thinking. Most
people want to comment on ideas not necessarily on a text in detail.

I have tried to create a simple way for people to annotate and add to the text. This has worked up to a point. But the main lesson it seems to me is that you have to give people as many different ways in which they can comment and participate. They will then choose the one that suits them, rather than the mechanism you have designed for them.

While I set my site up as the focal point of the conversation actually it turns out, obvious really, that most of the conversation takes place elsewhere, on blogs run by other people, out there in the ether. Most people don’t really want to comment on what I have written but to add to it or make links to ideas and examples they think would add to it. It is less a critical process than a cumulative and additive one.

Finally it has made me think harder about whether what I am doing is writing a book at all. Rosemary Belcher in Unbounded Freedom her very good report on open culture published by Counterpoint the British Council think tank quotes Cory Doctorow the science fiction writer and open source advocate as saying that in open culture a book becomes a kind of practice, rather than a thing. Cory, along with Tim O’Reilly, the US technology journalist and thinker, is way ahead on practising this open book writing.

What I think he means is that the text only becomes a means to having an unfolding debate and conversation. And anyway there might be multiple texts flying around by the end of this process, each with its own conversation and viewpoints attached. Handing in a text to a publisher is just catching one point in that process. It’s not the end of it.

There are many more radical versions of this process being explored such as wiki books and the We Are Smarter Than Me project in the US. I am sure we are just at the beginning of all of this.

As for my own plans. I plan to incorporate as many of the comments and suggestions that people leave, including those critical of the argument, in the final manuscript which should be published in bookstores in the summer of 2007. My hope is that when the book is published it will be by me and many other people. It will acknowledge that I am not the sole author of the ideas.

The formal publication may then, I hope, provoke a further spate of contributions and comments, which might then change again the text for the paperback published perhaps in 2008. It would be We-Think 2.0. In parallel I’d hope that the ideas spread and get modified and debated all over the place, with fragments of the book all over the blogsphere.

Will all this work? I have no idea but I figured it was worth giving it a try.