The Power of Community: we are smarter than me

Talking about what's happening taditional book publishing, Wharton, MIT, Pearson, Shared Insights are behind of this new book initative which will be published by Pearson. The book is on "the future rules of business based on the emergence of community and social networks".

The organizers invited close to 1 million people (inclusing all Wharton and MIT communities) to participate in the writing of the book. Jimmy Wales founder of the Wikipedia is also on the board of the organization, and they will use wiki technology to write the book.

Here is the goal:

"Since the beginning of publishing, books have been written by individuals or by small groups of people (experts). This has even applied to recent books that describe the power of community intelligence. We Are Smarter Than Me will test this paradox, and determine whether a community of authors can write a compelling book better than individual experts."

I wonder what our Book Publishing division is thinking about this initiative?

The non-profit organization is seeking sponsors and supporters for this project. If anyone is reading this blog from Elsevier Foundation, you may want to check this opportunity and contact partnerinfo{at}sharedinsights.com. I'll look forward to see the final version.

Last week I was at Library Connect seminar with some of our customers and we were talking about online books and purchase models and I mentioned that there are examples of book co-authoring using wikis and in the future the market may demand a purchasing model that will enable them just to purchase 1 or 2 paragraphs from books. The future might be closer than I think of (at least in experiment)