Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, May 25, 2009

OA books to solicit reader feedback

Keith Fahlgren, Collaborative Publishing Based on Community Feedback, O'Reilly Labs, May 21, 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

... [O]ur 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 ... 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. Here's how Bryan O'Sullivan, one of the authors, summarized the idea once they were close to submitting their manuscript for publication:

How has our system of open, incremental development worked out? In my estimation, it has been a fantastic success, far overwhelming my expectations.

  • We have received 7153 comments so far.
  • That's an average of 1.73 comments per paragraph.
  • The usual number of technical reviewers for a technical book is 2.
  • 748 people have commented so far on our drafts.

Feedback from our readers has had a profound effect on the development of the book. ...

Bryan has since open sourced his Django-based feedback system ...