O’Reilly Takes The Plunge Into Collaborative Authoring With Open Feedback

Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we’re happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.After the impressive success of the Rough Cuts program from Safari Books Online, which we’ve long supported, and Real World Haskell, which used a similar system, we we’re extremely eager to try the idea out with more titles.

Collaborative Publishing Based on Community Feedback – O’Reilly Labs

Seems like a step in the right direction.  The ability to comment on a work at the paragraph level is a great idea.  I wonder if the OPFS engine for turning a book or manuscript into a commentable website will ne made available for others to use?

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