I see snippets of a huge sea-change come in to play, where the concept of "Book" is about to be socially deconstructed, delearnt, relearnt, and reconstructed. Imagine such an intro to a book, would you put down the book immediately and say - "oh, my, that was a heavy digest - too deep - demands too much of me in my reading - I am too lazy/too buzy/too fixed in my world-view/too whatever to read more".
Maybe I have lost you - as a reader! - already now.
Maybe you don't read books at all, anymore.
Maybe just Harry Potter is a bestseller of huge event-marketed proportion at release.
Maybe.
Or Maybe NOT.
Because - in a time of alot of "maybe's" there are some modes of the process of book writing turned upside down.
- Pioneering experiments - where I participated, Seth Godin's Crowdsourced "What Shall Google Do?".
- The Long tail - Chris Anderson writing a book through a blog, sourcing input from his readers before the first (needless to say, bestselling) print.
- We are Smarter than Me - a book written through a Wiki about how business can approach new social media forms emerging from the CCI @ MIT as a research experiment.
- We-think, on Wikia - with an igniting intro by Charles Leadbeater (who are one of the pioneering authors in the Literature Review in my Master Thesis on the emergence of the concept sustianopreneurship with his book the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur) - through @alheri • Lilly Evans :).
And, of course, the King of Kings, the Queen of Queens - Wikipedia with all the siblings, daugthers, sons and distant relatives in the whole Wikimedia Family, proximate and distant projects hosted on the MediaWiki platform, and complimentary Wikifying of all domains of human (inter)action on all Wiki-platforms. And the rest of eco/biosphere, cosmos and beyond...
We need a new conceptual framework on the process of authoring "books" of these collaborative kinds, but it already happened in a sense with the sixties "happening" - the Audience is on the Stage.
I shut up here, and encourage you all to make yourself able to say - "I am not reading books. I write them" ;).
Punch-line, ad lib, fade:
Feel free to join the "Chris Anderson Model" of book-blogging, which I tentatively have called "Pro-Active Crowdsourcing", in a response to Jimmy Wales, the King of Wikipedistan, and his critique of the concept crowdsourcing, where I add pro-active, in the write-up of "Sustainopreneurship - Business with a Cause. The Whys, Whats and Hows of Entrepreneuring for Sustainability" - but the proactive peer2peer crowdsourcing of that book already have changed the sub-title from the original "The Why, What, How of Creative Organizing for Sustainability". And it can be changed once, twice or maybe three times more. Or a Gazillion :). 11 people have joined the potential process of adding their input to it in the Group at the Sustainopreneurship Community. Three have used their sphere of influence already. Thus, the change!
I set example by deeds, not words.
Go to the Book Peer2Peer Review Group on Sustainpreneur's Café to see the evolvement!
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Post Scriptum: Time to reveal my motive for the categories bracketed in the subject lines, introduced on this blog just some weeks ago - they correspond to Book Parts, where the outline already is out, uncommented, on the Book Group ;). I will return here with a post blogging away the semi-final results when the convo over at the group have made their input at next stage - the Outline leading to a Synopsis, leading to a re-visiting to Older Texts, re-edit, recycling, revolving, revolutioning and ...reconstructing them into a new context, in which also a new context is introduced, new content is created, new concepts are constructed and new cases are crowd-sourced - pro-actively.
Thus will this text form some/any part of the Part Zero: Part 0. The Coverage. An intended kind-of intro chapter, where I believe this will be the chapter that is authored and putting final touch to latest in the process before the book goes in print...
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