Walter Isaacson is learning how to profit from the kindness of strangers, said Johana Bhuiyan in Capital New York. The former editor of Time, who published a best-selling biography of Steve Jobs two years ago, has decided to try crowdsourcing the editing of his current work in progress. The book will be a history of the innovators who laid the foundations of today’s digital age, and Isaacson’s research inspired him to start posting passages at various publishing-related sites in order to solicit corrections and commentary. “One of the things I learned is that the original intention of the Internet was to allow collaboration,” he says. “We got away from that, especially with the World Wide Web.”
Isaacson’s strategy has paid surprising dividends, said Gregory Ferenstein in TechCrunch.com. Useful feedback has come in from a few prominent academics and at least one figure—-former Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand—who is featured in the text. The whole experiment, Isaacson says, “has been surprisingly helpful. I have made dozens of factual changes, plus I have sketched out a few more substantive additions I plan to make.” The book will ultimately enjoy a very traditional polishing, said Joshua Brustein in Bloomberg Businessweek. At least four editors and fact-checkers at Simon & Schuster will scrutinize the manuscript before it’s published next year, and Isaacson has no plans to forfeit authorial control to the wisdom of the crowd. “You can take this too far,” he says. “There has to be someone in charge.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”