Author of the week: Walter Isaacson

last updated 8 January 2015

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.”