Literature 2.0: Collaborative book authoring goes beta on WEbook

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

April 9, 2008, 3:13 PM

The horribly overused "2.0" tag has made its way to the authoring community in a new online book publishing community called WEbook, which launched in public beta today.

Claiming to be a sort of open source approach to authoring literature, WEbook is a forum where new books can be composed by an individual wishing to "sandbox" his work, or by communities who submit content on a given subject which can then be voted into a book. The site's founders say they hope it does for publishing what Linux did for software and Wikipedia did for information.

Approved (i.e. highest-ranked) works get published by WEbook as hard copies, eBooks and audiobooks. The project's first published work, entitled Pandora was written entirely by the site's 17 alpha testers and is available directly on the WEbook site, Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Royalties are shared among the major contributors.

There are even mobile-formatted versions of works, though "formatted" is used loosely. These mobile pages of Pandora are left without paragraph breaks, making it something of an eyesore at present.

WEbook is funded by Greylock Partners a chief investment group for successful projects like Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, and Zipcar. Other major supporters include Yair Goldfinger, co-founder of ICQ, and Chris McKenney former COO of Publishers Group West/Worldwide.

Projects such as this do wonders for increasing the availability of the selected medium, but as has often been the case thus far, the result is a "long tail" effect on the industry. More content of a lower quality is available, making it yet more difficult to separate the good from the crowd, and when a candidate of suitable quality is found, its lifespan is greatly reduced.