Deciding, like Ingrid announced a few days ago, to focus on creating a collaborative writing/editing/publishing/announcing system was a natural for us.
And, it was one that was staring us in the face almost from the beginning. Ingrid, our intern Jonathan and I are all writers. Between us we’ve written or edited just about anything you can imagine. I’ve also published quite a few things including a number of books. So, as we looked at things to test out with our technology, we kept creating things that are related to writing, editing and publishing.
A story about 42 mice
One concrete version of that was launching Nootcards.com last week in a very private alpha. But, we’ve been working on more than Nootcards. We’ve also created a prototype of part of our collaborative writing/editing/publishing/announcing system. It’s handling the publication of four books: a novel, a collection of poems and stories, a non-fiction book and a dictionary.
The last is a Bible dictionary. It’s combines five existing out-of-copyright dictionaries into one master dictionary. For us, it was interesting, because it was if five different people contributed over 8,000 short articles. Some of those “authors” were writing on the same topic. And the whole thing needed to be assembled so that all of the pieces on one topic were brought together. We published it today. You can order it for Kindle (including the ability to get a sample for free).
This baby prints
We set it up as a print book at the same time. It would be an 1,886 page monster. You could buy a dedicated book reader and pay for the kindle edition for less than what it would cost to buy. If someone is willing to pay hundreds of dollars to own a print copy, email and I’ll let you know what it would cost to own a printed copy.
Or maybe it would be cool to pick a book, pick kindle/apple iBook/paperback/hardcover/pdf and get it exactly how you wanted. If nothing else, it could be a cool mashup that linked to Amazon/Apple/Whoever to do the actual buying. Hmmm… if only Amazon got it together and put “buy iBook” and “buy Nook” next to each of their entries. They’d loose a sliver of sales and lock up shopping eyeballs even more. Oh wait. Those could be partner links. Just think: Amazon as the biggest member in B&N’s biggest partner program.
More books are going into our prototype. Some are being written in GoogleDocs, some in our system proper. Some are a herd of small documents, some are a handful. And, so far, the prototype is handling everything we throw at it. And soon, if you want proof of how well our prototype works, you’ll be able to get it from Amazon. 🙂
Make it flow
It doesn’t matter whether we’re editing in our own tool or in GoogleDocs, it works the same. Writing, editing and designing the publications can all be done at the same time. You keep doing whatever needs to be done ones until you call it done. And then, you tell it to publish (aka click print). It literally pulls the latest of everything together then and creates print and Kindle version in moments. Well… when it’s 1,800 pages it can take a few moments longer.
It used to be there was a point where a book went from the writers and editors into the hands of those who design the book. With this, that’s no longer true. If one of those books needs a batch of changes, as soon as those changes are done, we can hit the button again and the rest just happens.