Trendsurfing: Wiki books (The Times)

By David Rowan

You use Wikipedia as a vast online free dictionary. You click around annotated mash-ups of Google Maps to share other people's thoughts on everything from recommended pubs to property prices. So it was inevitable that the publishing industry, too, would succumb to the power of collective intelligence. That quaint old notion of a professional editor being assigned to fine-tune an author's words is rapidly giving way to the supposed "wisdom of crowds". To be a fashionable publisher today, you'd better get thousands of editors working together.

The trend for collaboratively written books, or "networked" books, is a natural development from the extraordinary success of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, the innovator behind the Wikipedia Foundation, saw the potential of free open-source textbooks three years ago, when he formed Wikibooks (wikibooks.org) to encourage the world's thinkers to share their knowledge by writing and annotating together on the website. Anyone can participate, with varying levels of quality control assured by the rewriting and deleting skills of the wider online community. The result so far has been more than 1,000 full works and 22,500 "book modules" that can be downloaded as PDF files, printed by chapter, or simply consulted online for free. And now the grown-up publishing industry is starting to take note.

Part of Wikibooks' power is the project's ability to undercut the economics of traditional educational publishing. Students no longer have to pay up to £100 for specialist textbooks - sure, the new alternatives vary in quality, but they can be constantly updated as new knowledge emerges, and they allow feedback and discussion between students and those with information to share. The online talent pool has already produced works on Einstein's theory of special relativity and stuttering, relationships as well as rhetoric and composition. And if you don't like what's on offer, there is nothing stopping you from making your own improvements.

The model is proving too attractive - or is it threatening? - for traditional publishers to ignore. Last month, Pearson - that giant of the textbook industry - decided to join in. In conjunction with MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Pearson announced its own collaborative business book which it says will be written by "thousands, if not tens of thousands of authors and editors". When it rolls off the presses next autumn, the book - tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me - will be somewhere around 120 physical pages and cost £14. Yet although none of the authors and editors will be paid, they seem happy to give their time: already 1,700 participants have registered to contribute their expertise through a website, wearesmarter.org. It even has as an adviser Jimmy Wales himself, who thinks that the project "may usher in a new model for how book publishers can acquire, create and market their content, as well as how their books can be distributed and used".

Is this the future? It's hard to tell: We Are Smarter is partly about these new collaborative business trends, and academics may be more reluctant to share for free their knowledge of cardiology or Cantonese if they know that a big public company stands to profit. By contrast, the non-profit Wikibooks site can draw upon a guaranteed pool of goodwill. Today, for instance, you can consult its textbooks devoted to overcoming procrastination ("form a group of Procrastinators Anonymous"), Bulgarian ("Mnógosi húbaf/húbava" means "You're very pretty"), even a Travel Guide to London ("Buses are typically late").

Now, anyone ready to start a Wiki Trendsurfing website so this columnist can take a week off?

(The Times Magazine, December 9 2006)