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Was This the First CC Community-Edited Novel?
Odinson writes "In late 2005 I released a draft of a science fiction novel under the by-nc-nd CC license. I started accepting edits in the hope of polishing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. A publisher never materialized, but after thousands of comments the draft started getting really solid. So a couple of months ago I decided to buy an ISBN and sell hard copies from Lulu. While doing research for a press release, I was unable to uncover the first community-edited, CC-licensed work of fiction. I strongly suspect that my novel is the first. Can anybody point to a prior example? How about under other licenses? If someone has traveled this road before, I'd like to ask them how it went. I would also like to vet this question here before staking a claim to be the first."
There certainly existed community-edited novel-length fanfiction before 2005, although I don't know if you would count them as "real" novels.
:)
Also the license terms for fanfiction are generally rather murky
Sure that's such a good idea?
Pg. 147
"As Ja Rool climbed out of the skies CLAIRE IS T3H AWESOME of Planet 142, in the yellow smoke trails he caught the glint BUCH SUCKS of an enemy spacecraft. Maneuvering his nimble XPJ-134, JAMES LOVE CINDY."
Cheers!
--
Vig
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
* (c) 2008 Anonymous Coward
* This comment is free; you can
* modify it and repost under the
* nc-by-nd CC license.
*
I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok!
I release this post with the CC license!
HE'S A LUMBERJACK AND HE'S OK!
HE RELEASES THIS POST WITH THE CC LICENSE!
I write a post, I eat my lunch
I ask for changes from others.
HE WRITES A POST, HE EATS HIS LUNCH
HE ASKS FOR CHANGES FROM OTHERS!
I write down comments, I skip and jump
I like to press wild flowers
HE WRITES DOWN COMMENTS, HE SKIPS AND JUMPS
HE LIKES TO PRESS WILD FLOWERS
I put on women's clothing
That's why I'm famous now!
HE PUTS ON WOMEN'S CLOTHING
THAT'S WHY HE'S FAMOUS NOW!
The Rifter series was released circa 2001 or so and is available at rifters.com for free under a CC licence IIRC. However, I'm fairly sure Watts used a publisher for the back end stuff.
Congrats, and thank you for looking to publish in this manner.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
But infinity being what it is they would also produce Shakespeare and thicker than blood.
You obviously wouldn't publish anything from their 'e' period.
It's been done before, in fact it happened to some friends of a friend of mine, they didn't like each other very much and were made to write a story together, alternating paragraph by paragraph... it went something like this:
At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.
Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
Little did she know, but she has less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"
This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.
Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.
You total $*&.
Stupid %&#$!.
No, it's still in editing. Please stand by while we continue to write it.
Wouldn't that be the Bible? = )
This is not a problem of crowdsourcing at all. Contributors to Mozilla and Firefox don't ask for a cut of the profits/donations it receives from Google or other partnerships, and users of the browser don't get paid for using it. The fact you get to use Wikipedia is enough, and no one forces you to contribute to the common good, or commons. If you want to participate that is a free choice. You should not be vilified for trying to get some revenue back for open sourcing your work -- you should be congratulated for releasing it as such rather than going for the default 'commercial' model.
http://bittornado.com/torrents/Thicker-Than-Blood.pdf.torrent
Sorry about the off-topic reply, just trying to help people w/ their slow download.
Ad-block is the bomb.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
I am one of the community editors for this book. My name is listed in the acknowledgments.
First let me say that the book is awesome. It's got a great plot, great characters, and it pulls you in. A few times I was late to work by a few minutes because I just couldn't put the book down until I finished the chapter I was reading. I highly recommend it.
Now, let me explain how I helped edit the book. I can't speak for the other editors, but this is how I got involved. I decided I was going to read the book, so I downloaded it and started reading. I find that I'm pretty good at finding typos and grammatical errors in books. I find them in books that are published by the big publishers & authors all the time. I usually find at least one or two mistakes in every book I read. When I was reading thicker than blood I just started keeping track of everything that I knew was misspelled or grammatically incorrect and everything that I was unsure of as well. When I had finished the book I found that I had nearly 200 edits, so I sent them over to the author. He was very grateful and a few months later he sent me a printed copy of his book.
So, the 'nd' doesn't really apply because I never made a derivative work, I just sent him a patch that was human-readable-only. The changes that I made are so small that copyright doesn't apply to my changes. I mean, I would assign him the copyright if it did matter, but such a small change would not trigger copyright. If I had rewritten a few paragraphs or added any real substance it may have, but fixing typos and making sure apostrophes are placed correctly does not deserve any attention from copyright. These are the contributions that I made and I can not speak for other editors.
Again, I can't recommend the book enough. I can't wait for the sequel.
Mark Drago.
Since you can download it for free, best I can figure is I really just did this for the Slashdot Karma. :)
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Actually, I believe they were a flying circus.
This is exactly the point. Publishing is not being crowdsourced; editing is. The resulting work is publicly available for ANYONE to take and print under their own ISBN; in this case, it is the person who originated the project who decided to monetize it through publication. Hopefully he'll roll the profits back into the site to help foster future such projects -- but that's his choice. He could just as easily pocket the profits. If he does this, the rest of his team is within their rights to fork the project and produce their own in-print copy (with edits if desired).