Books in Beta Form

congaflum writes "The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently released the second beta of their upcoming book Agile Web Development with Rails. By releasing the book to the public in beta form, the authors are able to gather feedback about the books content from a larger audience that would normally be the case. Readers get to influence the direction on the books content by posting feedback to the publisher's website. And of course there's the benefit of simply getting to read the book early. Could beta-version books be a sign of future changes in the commercial publishing industry? And with the availability of things like print on demand these days, how about books that are much more frequently revised (why buy a year-old Edition 1 of something, if you can have Edition 1.1.18?)"

Comments

Star Wars Beta?

[fembots]

Maybe Star Wars should be released in beta? This way nobody can really argue who shot first.

For a guide/manual book, beta is probably a good idea because the ultimate goal is for readers to make use of the book easily.

For a story book, instead of releasing beta of a pseudo-complete book, author should release it chapter by chapter, and change the story direction based on reader feedback, in another word, Plot-Beta rather than Writing-Beta.

Re:Star Wars Beta?

[Ambush Commander]

For a story book, instead of releasing beta of a pseudo-complete book, author should release it chapter by chapter, and change the story direction based on reader feedback, in another word, Plot-Beta rather than Writing-Beta.

That would be a disaster. ;-) Seriously, though, a lot of the time, the criteria for getting a book published simply is whether or not it's finished or not. Young, struggling writer = Unfinished Novels. Lots of them. Old, struggling writers = Finished Novels that sold about 100 copies. Let's not change the problem.

Counterpoint

[FunWithHeadlines]

You make a valid point, but mostly when a committee actually tries to sit down and write something. In contrast, soliciting feedback is an author's best friend. The readers of the author's work give comments that might not be valid, but they just might be. Grammatical errors are found, or changes in tone, or just hard to read sections. All of this is very valuable, and the reason editors exist.

This is a way of open-sourcing, so to speak, the editorial process. And as long as the author has final say ("What? That's a stupid suggestion!") it can still read as one person's voice, but a voice that has been refined by many eyes to eliminate the inevitable mistakes.