Are publishers relevant? (was: [Upd-discuss] Getting Real, the book)

[Lars Aronsson]

Andy Oram wrote:

> I am becoming more and more convinced that the future of 
> publication is user communities [...]
> http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/professional/improve_doc.pdf

It sounds more like you are searching for new business models for 
O'Reilly than ways to expand the public domain.  Or did I miss 
something?

Sourceforge and similar sites are huge graveyards or scrapyards of 
failed software projects, with a tiny minority of useful 
successes.  If you want to dig through them to find writers of new 
O'Reilly books, you would either have to filter away most of the 
people, or you would have to teach them to write.  I think that 
Wikipedia could need a writer school too, as it shifts from 
quantity to quality.  The first slides of your presentation look 
like the beginning of a writer school, but I don't quite get the 
context.

Perhaps you should take a look at the two-way cooperation that is 
going on between the German Wikipedia community and the publisher 
Directmedia in Berlin.  Do you speak German?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se