Booki Blog

Instead of talking about new book publishing models and moving incrementally within or slightly without its walls lets try something else, place ourselves in a space completely *inside* the space where content is as far as feasibly possible free (libre) – one such space for this I would like to call ‘federated publishing’.

Federated Publishing is not a ‘model’ it is in fact a network of models – enabling multiple approaches of content production, distribution and consumption. It is a space enabled by four core elements – digitally networked corpora, interoperable libre licensed content, federated open book production and ‘publishing’ platforms, and people. It is a space that enables traditional established book production techniques but fuels new approaches which are radically different – a space where books have no authors, attribution is not really anything anyone cares about, quality is high, books live – constantly updated and improved, books magically migrate across languages, high quality text books are produced in exceedingly short times measured in minutes, hours or days, books have no publisher but multiple channels and multiple contexts, content is shifted between contexts rapidly and easily, people get paid, reputations get made, economies exist.

This is not pie in the sky. This exists now. FLOSS Manuals has inadvertently found itself tinkering inside of publishing for the past 5 years. We have broken many established practices because we didn’t know any better. We have developed tools that don’t imagine a future but were built to provide sensible pathways to what we wanted to achieve. We now surface after 5 years of this, look around and realise we are simultaneously inside and outside publishing. We articulate this as ‘Federated Publishing’.

Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network jargon, which itself is born out of a need to transform proprietary network services into a modern Free Software critique. Federated Publishing is not in itself a critique, it is an active and vibrant practice – but it is born from this ideological legacy.

Publishing is trying to invent a new proprietary future. This proprietorship is to be taken in the broadest possible understanding. It is not just a question of closed copyright finding new distribution formats and economic models, it is a question of domain branding strategies within free culture and the unwillingness to make content interoperable on a technical, legal, or social cultural level.

We are tied to the need to tie ourselves to the content we produce. We enable the commit bit whenever we can by default and it is a tiring and resource consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and knowledge.

Federated Publishing is a future we are working in now at FLOSS Manuals. We actively encourage anyone to make a book, chapter, edit. We encourage anyone to fork a book, take it to their own domain, translate it, reuse it, break it, voice multiple discordant positions and concerns within the same covers, break the use of ‘I’ as a dominant identifier for a single individual author, take the book without changing a word and make your million. No problems.

We aim to generate federated interoperable corpora enabled by common sense technology and an increasing consciousness that a book is ‘ours’ to do as ‘I’, you, them, or we want. We are starting with free manuals and aim to provide an example of what is possible within and between domains.

We currently work like this. All the content is free, we use one license to increase interoperability and we discourage talk of licenses to encourage productivity, we provide all the tools we make for free and make it easy for you to take anything you want from us. Our website templates, books, community, platform… whatever you like.

In this environment books transform – they migrate across contexts, they are translated, they are kept alive, they are used the world over to help people learn about free software, they are of extremely good quality, they provide economies for those that wish to pursue the seemingly radical practices.

Sound impossible to have an economy here? Another free culture revolution without a strategy to pay the rent? Consider Marshall McLuhan’s astonishing vision :

“Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems … and they at once Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.”

That was not a vision of the internet, it is a vision of the book. The internet does not work like that. Books can. This is the way I have paid my rent for the last two years. By making books that are an accumulation of everything that you need in a book. There is one major difference and something that Marshall Mcluhan may not have interwined into this thread – the net has brought social production networks to a scale that the person on the other end of McLuhan’s phone line is an asynchronous network of people you have never met, and is even you. You make books with others, you decide what a book is and what goes in it, others add ideas and content that either you cant produce or cant produce in time. 100% original source books are created in days. Others in minutes.

People pay for that. They pay for you to help them do that. It is the beginning of Federated Publishing services, it is the end of nothing.

So what are the revenue models for collaboratively produced free books? Seems like a very difficult proposition. Not only do you have to find some way to sell something that is free, always at least a little tricky, but you have then have to split that revenue between multiple authors not just one. Sounds like a losing game to many publishers I am sure. Well, the ‘traditional’ model or at least the model that is re-establishing itself through app stores is to sell the final product. App stores sell electronic books very very cheaply and make them easy to access – the theory being that you will buy something if it is cheap and not a hassle to get. You are in effect paying for a service, not the book. So the theory goes – it can also work for free content since the book is not the commodity but the service.

This could be the way and it at least appears to be working for some publishers if you believe the evangelism for this model at places like the OReilly Tools of Change conferences. However I think there are more interesting possibilities.

Recently a free book developed in FLOSS Manuals by a single author (James Simmons) was put onto the ‘crowd sourcing’ platform Kickstarter.com (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rdcHQ/rural-design-collective-2010-summer-mentoring-prog). The Rural Design Collective put the book there to raise money to do the design and production of it. As they stated in the project summary:

How We Will Use The Money
Our program will take place during the 2010 summer months, June – August. Using our collaborative work on the FLOSS Manual as a guide, we will build a three month course around eBooks. Custom-designed physical copies of the FLOSS Manual will be created by the participants in our program to continue to raise awareness and funds for our work. In addition, a standalone website will be created containing code samples and utilities to help others get started working with eBooks.

So they were pitching the book as tool that would have a very real and tangible output – a 3 month course on eBooks. The project effectively then has at least 2 tangible outcomes – the book and the course (plus the website etc). This is pretty much considered ‘best practice’ when pushing things on crowd sourcing platforms. Make the proposition tangible and real.

The Rural Design Collective raised $2130 US dollars for the project. Not a sum most publishers would be interested in but it does raise an interesting point – people are prepared to fund a book that they want. That’s quite a reversal – the consumer is actively switching sides to become ‘part’ of the production team by helping finance the product. The advantage of this process is that if you can raise the funds for the project like this then you don’t have to rely on sales to recover your costs or make a profit. That means there is a better chance for the product to be a ‘no strings attached’ free product. The content can actually be free because no one is anxious to recover their costs from sales. That also means that the post production can focus on distributing the content as far and wide as possible because at that stage the return is recognition through distribution. This can, if done well, help with the next project that needs funding…the better you are known for producing good quality free products the easier it will be to convince people to help pay for their production.

But…’what about the real money’? Surely a question on every publisher lips right now…Well find people that want books to be produced and get them to pay for them. Universities want books? Get them to pool their resources and pay for the books entire production. NGOs want books? Same deal…turn the economics on its head. Don’t take the risk of getting a return from sales, find the people with the money that want to pay for the books before you produce them and have your incoming revenue stream solved before you write the book…. Why do it collaboratively I hear the attentive reader asking? Because you can do it faster and if you have someone paying for something you don’t want to make them wait. Book Sprint it. It can work for you, it can work for the ‘commissioners’ and more importantly it can work for free culture.

Largely because of the cheapness of paper and the cultural context this and the print production process have created we have come to worship the book as a static cultural artefact. It almost seems to us that ‘static-ness’ is a part of a book genetics so much so that many people find it even hard to pick up a pen and write notes in the margin of books. We have forgotten that notes like this (‘marginalia’) were once very common – when paper was hard to come by sometimes the margin notes were where books were written. There is even a science dedicated to reconstructing manuscripts (‘textual criticism’) which is in part focused on how to construct ‘the text’ from works where the author has commented on and changed their own works via the margins. It is hard to call these alterations ‘comments’ since they are direct interventions by ‘the author’. In the days when margins were used for notes by both readers and writers it was sometimes difficult for the copyists (the profession that copied books which was common before the printing press) to know which were the authors additions and which marginalia were ‘by others’. Hence textual criticism is often focused on the arguments surrounding which marginalia should be considered part of the ‘final’ work.

It would make some kind of sense that margin notes might come back into fashion since paper is so cheap that we can easily purchase clean copies of books to replace those ‘contaminated’ by marginalia. However the choice has been to keep notes in note books, and leave the printed volume unaltered.

There are a few digital projects (notably commentpress – http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/ -  and some ebook readers) that enable types of margin notes. In the case of Commentpress these notes are the point of the book – a place to start discourse (almost literally) around the book.

The point is that now, through projects like Commentpress, we are in a position where we can start to deconstruct the ‘unalterably’ of books. Ironically we can welcome marginalia again not because the price of paper is too high that we need to use the margins or  so low that it doesn’t matter if we use the margins – but because we don’t need paper at all. There is an interesting historical irony at play since we do not need ‘margins’ if we do not need paper. However we can now can feel marginalia is appropriate because it does not alter the source of a book.

It seems we are finding ways to have marginalia that do not contribute to the book but contribute around the margins of the book. Textual criticism in a few hundred years may might be an easy job since the textual critic can just parse the margins notes out of the source. The Foundation of the Long Now might have something to say about this since they advocate that we are living in what ill be known as ‘the Digital Dark Age’ .Digital data has a very short lifespan and hence the data for digital-only texts might not exist at all or might only be accessible through forensic means. Still, the point is we are still not talking about the unalterability of books, we do not seem to be able to move towards changing the book only working around the outlines. This remains unchallenged even though we can ‘fork’ books (copy the entire text and work on it leaving the original unaltered) and do with them as we like (especially now that free licenses are becoming more popular). We somehow still cannot bring ourselves to consider changing an existing book. Even harder is to allow ourselves the opportunity to believe that we can improve a book.

Why not? Translation is a way to improve a text. If this was not done then many texts within a single language would not hardly be understandable today. Ever try and read some old English? Know what this is?

‘Oure fadir þat art in heuenes halwid be þi name;
þi reume or kyngdom come to be. Be þi wille don in herþe as it is dounin heuene.
yeue to us today oure eche dayes bred.
And foryeue to us oure dettis þat is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris þat is to men þat han synned in us.
And lede us not into temptacion but delyuere us from euyl.‘

It is this :

‘Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debters.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’

The first text is in middle English (which existed in the period between Old and Modern English). In effect the work has been ‘improved’ so we can understand it (not a ‘literary’ improvement as such). Translation like this is a type of re-use. You take the text and transform it into another context. In this example the new context is another time. Translation being what it is, we accept it can always be improved even though sometimes there are ‘authoritative’ star translators – people who have translated a text with such nuance that it is considered hard to improve their translation. The German translations of Dostoyevsky by Svetlana Geier (subject of the film ‘the Woman with the 5  Elephants’) are almost considered ‘final’ works in themselves. Somehow Svetlana Geier has come to be regarded as some kind of manifestation of Dostoyevsky. Even so her works are translations and hence it is somehow easier for us to believe we can improve these because they are not the original.

So why not? Why not improve the original? Can’t we take a book, any book, and improve it. Why is that idea so difficult for us to engage with. Why is it easier for us to consider improving a translated work but not OK for us to consider improving the original? Why can we improve the work of Svetlana Geier but we can’t improve Dostoyevsky?.

Before going on – a few seconds to note a great irony here – we have the legal right to improve Dostoyevsky since his works are in the public domain – the copyright has expired so we are legally permitted to do what we like with the works. However we do not have the legal right to improve Svetlana Geiers translations since they are translated works and as such are considered by copyright law to be original works. Svetlanas works are still bound by copyright and will not expire for some time. Which, to me, goes to illustrate that ‘free licenses’ have very little to do with free culture but thats another story…

Well one part of the puzzle involves publishing and authorship of static books building a robust unalterable context for the authoritative version. The version born from the author. We (you or I) are not that author and so we cannot know the authors intent with all its nuances. We should not therefore meddle with a work because we would be breaking our unspoken contract to preserve the authors intent. It would not be, even though we have the tools and licensed freedom (in many cases) to change, considered an appropriate thing to do. We do not have the authority to do it. The authority is inherent in the author alone – so much so that the role of the author to the book is analogue to the role of ‘god’ to its creation. The author is the creator.

In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies the children use Piggy’s glasses as a magnifying glass to start a fire. However Piggy was short sighted and hence starting fires with his glasses would be impossible since they are concave and concave lenses disperse light. You cannot start a fire with a concave lenses. And yet would we allow anyone to alter the book to improve upon what is a rather trivial fact? No. No because the book is Goldings world and in Goldings world concave lenses start fires. Golding is the creator. He has the authority to change his creation and we do not.

So many layers to unravel. Lets roll back a little to Book Sprints again – they are interesting here because the books are born from collaboration. There is no single author whose intent we need to imagine and hold dear. The authority is distributed from the outset. However in my experience it is still difficult to get people to cross that imaginary threshold and improve a work even though the invitation is explicit. Many people still ask if they can improve a Book Sprinted work even though the mandate to change a work is obviously being passed by ‘the creators’ to anyone.

Infact there is no guarantee that collaborative works pass on the mandate to change. Wikipedia is an interesting case in point. Wikis and Wikipedia have managed to introduce ideas of participative knowledge creation but as Lawerence Liang (http://vimeo.com/10750350)  has argued Wikipedia is possibly trying to establish itself as an authoritative knowledge base which also has the effect of revoking the mandate to change as has been experienced by many new contributors that find their edits reversed.

I think we will leave this all behind in time but its going to be a long time.

All books can be improved – even the most sacrosanct literary works. Its good illustration that change is often not a result of the possibilities of technology but the possibilities that have been closed to us through our internalisation of old technology. We have inherited a notion of Immovable Type. The only thing that can change that is the shock of possibility, necessity, or time.

A very nice coincidence, the last days I wrote a few blog posts which referenced Bob Stein and today he was in town so we had dinner and a very interesting discussion over Pizza in a nice restaurant in Berlin. We had a great discussion about the idea of books, writing, publishing etc and where it is and isn’t all going. It was a rare pleasure.

One topic that came up a few times was the need to further explore multiple voices in books. This issue has come up in various forms in book sprints. In a sprint it is often the case that the contributors worry a lot about the ‘voice’ of the book. How do collaborators produce one unified harmonious voice as we have come to accept as the ‘norm’ in single author published works. There is sometimes almost heated discussion about the usage of “I” versus “we” especially when relating personal anecdotes in a text. I usually try to tell sprinters to not worry about it. What does it matter? Isn’t it more interesting to have strong identifiable distinct or even divergent voices in a book? For example in Collaborative Futures we have this anecdote:

“I remember one night in 1994 when I was a young soldier serving in an Israeli army base near the Palestinian city of Hebron, around 3:30am a car pulled off just outside the gates of our base. The door opened and a dead body was dropped from the back seat on the road. The car then turned around and rushed back towards the city. The soldiers that examined the body found it belonged to a Palestinian man. Attached to his back was a sign with the word “Collaborator”.”

http://en.flossmanuals.net/collaborative-futures/ch016_collaborationism/

Also in the text we have this:

“I always had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t quite as much myself as I thought I was. It was breastfeeding my son that convinced me of this as a real, material fact. It is very liberating to realize that I am really, wholly not me, that I do not have to figure out “who I am” nor “express myself”. My experience of pregnancy and breastfeeding was myself as more than me; not doubled, not serving as a “carrier” for another individual human self. Rather as a joined creature, a multiplication of my creatureliness. ”

http://en.flossmanuals.net/collaborative-futures/ch004_this-book-might-be-useless/

These are direct personal experiences from two of the contributors to the book – each related through the first person singular and yet they are not the same person and this change was not identified in the narrative. Great. How fantastic to have such a richness of experience in the text and relayed so intimately. Why do we need to have just one voice, or disguise multiple voices so they appear as one, or announce a change in voice? One of the most fantastic aspects of a book sprint is that you can bring all those voices of the contributors into the text. It makes the book rich with diversity and life and it denies the imagining of one harmonised ‘all knowing voice’.

The voices can be so diverse at times that the book appears to be ‘disagreeing with itself’.

In one ‘version’ (what exactly is a version/edition is also up for grabs of course) of Collaborative Futures the book began by celebrating the group Anonymous. The first chapter ended with :

“Anonymous has operated under rules that are directly opposed to the rules that have governed most successful large-scale collaborations. How then do goals as broadly defined as “the lulz” become defined and articulated into a goal like the intent to “systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology”? How can an organization with no leaders articulate and execute such an ambitious and “long, long campaign”? How can the enforced absence of any structure as a governing principle result in such effective and coordinated action?

Is this a possible collaborative future?”

http://en.flossmanuals.net/collaborative-futures

The point was a kind of celebration of the collaborative power of Anonymous. However the next ‘published’ version which emerged after a re-sprint of the book in New York read:

“…Is this a possible collaborative future? If so, it is a terrifying one in which anonymity and structurelessness permits total absolution of social responsibility, terrorizing of innocent outsiders, and harassment of those who provide public feedback, criticism and indeed even speak of the group (“You do not talk about anonymous”). It is a P2P, collaborative, digitized “Lord of the Flies” wherein boys’ games devolve into violence for fun. In the perpetual techno-utopian dialectic, this is the feared dystopian future we hope will be avoided, as we aim for the utopia that we can never actually arrive at.”

Pretty much a total reversal. Isn’t that fantastic? We need more books with diverse and divergent voices offering disagreement and vibrant discourse and challenging you to reject the authorative voice of the text and think while reading.

The more I ponder what we do in Book Sprint (‘make a book’) and the more I ponder the various output formats available to booki the less I feel I know what a book actually is. We make books in book sprints and this is critical. It is amazing what a great motivator it is to say to the group ‘at the end of this week you will have made a book’. It seems impossible, incredible, and exciting. It is! It has more power than (I think) saying ‘at the end of this week we will have produced a PDF’. Although…thats actually what we are doing. We are making a PDF that we send to a printer. Or we are making a EPUB (ebook) or templated HTML…etc…So the concept of making a book is a very important ingredient for Book Sprints …but what actually is a book?

I am becoming more convinced that books are just formats that keep a lot of information in one place. That information might be a novel, a software manual, a textbook etc and the format might be a paper book. However its obvious that each of these can now exist as books without paper. They can now exist without paper just as books went on to exist even though they stopped being scrolls. So what do we have left? What is the essence of a book that will survive?

First I do not want to say paper books will stop being created. I think we are a very long way from that being the case. However we do have some interesting questions about what other things books can be or are right now. To do this we have to loosen our minds a little and let go of certain constructs or as Bob Stein has put it  (in ‘The Form of the Book Book’) we should (when referring to ebook readers) be very careful not to re-invent the past inorder to invent the future. Nicely put.

What the future contains for books is up for grabs but I cannot but help feel that one future for the book is a future as a curated container of ideas within a given scope. Sound vague? It is very vague but its a response in me to the frustrating lack of this kind of material on the great world wide web. It has to be noted that so far the web, with all the distributed data possibilities, has not proven to be a very good breeding ground for the creation and presentation of comprehensive works on a given subject (including fiction). We have an awful lot of snippets and byte sized chunks but not so much comprehensive material. So it is easy, for example, to find a blog post on a given topic but it is very difficult to find a comprehensive well structured beautifully flowing narrative designed to take you  through a subject from start to finish. You might find link lists or multiple associated snippets from various sources but hardly ever that satisfying full work.

Time might change all that. We might just end up with so much information on the net that over time all needs are met. We get different ways of building information, associating it etc. Until then I think the book has a role even just to point out the deficiencies of our current online world and offering us a way to imagine books as they should be ‘in the network’. I don’t just mean content augmented with link lists from other sources as ‘recommended further reading’, I mean that we should have more well designed comprehensive material online about subject x (y or z) ‘in one place’. Thats is to me – one idea of a book. Of course what ‘in one place’ actually means might be food for another discussion, in the meantime make a book online and contribute to a necessary future of ‘the book’.

I’m reading a really fantastic book at the moment about the history of paper “Paper before print” by Jonathon M Bloom. Really worth checking out…it has a wonderful introduction to the history of paper which opened my eyes to the importance of paper in the history of transmitting ideas. Books are afterall just a clever way to keep as much paper together in one place to communicate an idea bigger than one sheet. Which is why we can talk meaningfully about a 2 page book – sometimes 2 pages is enough.

Now books are looking for a new form since the paper is, for the first time since the death of parchment, no longer necessary. Paper it seems, will return to its first role – packaging. A strangely circular media history.

Anyways,  there was one very nice piece in “Paper before print” that caught my attention. It caught my imagination because of a tangent – I had been thinking of how to write a book about Book Sprints and so I have been thinking about the important ingredients of Book Sprints. The piece reads:

"...the Greeks[...]began representing all their language sounds, not only the
 consonants and long vowels[...]This made the crucial gain in legibility and
 accuracy in the transcription of sounds."

In otherwords, the Greeks started representing their spoken language in text so each spoken sound had a textual equivalent. Text became a way of transcribing sound.

I like this very much because it means in a way, that books are noisy objects. We have come to think of books as quiet items – they are written in solitude and read in solitude. There are other ways of looking at this – Bob Stein talks of reading and writing as being inherently social processes (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/what_ive_learned_since_posting.html) and I have heard him speak of books being places ‘where readers and writers meet’ (http://toccon.blip.tv/file/1781125/). In this sense they are noisy objects too since books trigger discussion in society – their effect is in discourse and that’s inherently noisy.

However…I was really thinking of noise in Book Sprints. I always say to a new sprint group ‘sprints are noisy environments’. They very much are – you cannot write a book quickly or well with other people if you do not talk to them. The conversation then continues through the text and back to the table. It goes around and around in a circular speech-to-text-to-speech process. Book Sprints are noise that is not just ‘transcribed’ into text but it is itself a discussion.

Anyways, I got there via tangents but I very much like the ideas of books representing noise – Book Sprints are, for me, another way to think about noisy books.

The production of a book is usually very tightly controlled by the author(s) and publisher(s) that produce it. We have come to accept that as just the way it is. You want to write a book then naturally you have the right to decide what the text of that book will be.  Seems almost non-controversial.

So, its normal to be asked how can you exercise a similar amount of control over a book in Booki. Its an understandable question but very difficult to answer. Difficult because the answer has to cross paradigms – the first paradigm being the established book production and publishing model that we all know, and the second being book production with free licenses in an open system. So I usually find myself answering questions like this with a simple “You can’t” and wait for the reaction. It’s intended to be a provocative answer and the further the eyes roll back in the skull the more I know I have to unwrap the concept of ‘publishing’ in the new(ish) era of free culture for whoever it was that asked the question.

But the reality isn’t so simple – it’s much more interesting.

First there seems often to be an unspoken assumption that control is necessary, along with this comes the assumption that open content must be protected. Protected from harm – not just the malicious kind but harm inflicted by contributions that lower the quality of the text. My experience from 4 years running an entirely open system (FLOSS Manuals) is that there is little to fear except spam. In four years running FLOSS Manuals I have not seen a single malicious edit. It seems to be the case that if people are not interested in your book they will leave you alone. If they are interested I have found that the approaches to the text are sensitive and respectful and more often than not they improve the work – sometimes in very surprising ways. On one book I worked on a retired copy editor went from top to bottom of the 45,000 word text in his afternoons and made an incredible improvement to the text. I would like to have thanked him but I never met him.

The trick is not to protect the text but to manage it. To do this first you must make a decision on what kind of development process this is and what kind of contributions you would like.  From my experience the best strategy is to try and relinquish as much control as possible in order to achieve the right kind and amount of contributions. To this end Booki provides some very useful tools to help you. If you want to keep your book very quiet then you can hide a book so that it does not appear on booki at all except on your profile page. Privacy through obscurity. If you want to keep things really really quiet then you can grab the booki sources and install booki on your own server (or laptop) somewhere out of reach of anyone. If you want the book totally open for anyone to jump in then that is the default position with Booki all you have to do then is get the word out as much as you can and invite people to contribute. If you create a new book or chapter then that information gets broadcast on the front page of booki, however it is often harder than you think to attract attention and contributions. It often relies on how effectively you can get the word out and how attractive you make the offer. You need to reach out to people and inspire them. The more direct the approach the better – personal emails work best, emphasising concrete outcomes is very likely to improve results, as is making the offer fun, relevant and illustrating a real need. But the usual rules apply for attracting volunteers in any realm – its a mix of luck and getting the tone and channels right.

Once the contributions start rolling in then it’s up to you to manage this process. To this purpose there are a number of tools available in booki – most importantly the history tab where you can view changes and roll back to earlier versions of any chapter as you wish. If things get out of control you can clone (copy) the entire book and decide on a more moderate development approach. However the best tool for managing input and getting the book to where you want it to be is social management. You need to coerce the contributors to come along with you and share your vision of what the book should be. At the same time you need to also be able to make the process satisfying to them. We have tools available to help with this communicative process (chat, notes etc) but its often reliant on your tone and approach.

So ‘how to control’ a book is a question I would like to see asked more often with more nuance and colour to the question. However I think if you can lose the feeling that you must control the book and instead relinquish as much control as possible you will be surprised and very probably excited by the results. In a world of free culture its all about the art of losing control…