How does this relate to HN or tech startups, you may wonder? This past Valentines Day, you might remember a post called "Neovella: Instantly co-author stories with your friends (or strangers)!" Neovella.com enables streamlined collaboration in writing short stories, through a turn-based "exquisite cadaver" method.
The monetization scheme was to publish the best works from that mode of literary production, and take a 10% cut while redistributing the rest out to all the co-authors involved. This anthology is the result of that first experiment. Every story (17 included) was written turn-by-turn, ranging from 2 to 10 authors. Compared to a paperback novel, this would total somewhere near 120 pages.
As for the content--well, it's definitely a reflection of Internet culture. :)
Not to take away from this work, but the title is wrong, or at least needs more specification. There's at least one book that was 100% crowdsourced before this:
All of the stories were written by users on Mechanical Turk, around 2008. The project got a lot of press and attention at the time, on O'Reilly, Boing Boing, and the like. The "author" also wrote a how-to on Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Dont-Do-It-Yourself-Start-a-...
I think the difference here is that this book is crowdsourced on a more granular level, by sentence.
So every sentence in a single story could have been written by a different author.
Are you sure you understand how this publication was "crowd-sourced"? Writers take turns contributing to a single plot/story--no one individual is writing anything cohesive on its own. The crowd-sourcing aspect is the fundamental production method.
I found another site similar to that, they're trying to beat the Guinness Record for the book with the most authors: http://wabblegame.com
Still, http://neovella.com/ is probably a way better one.
First, I love this kinda stuff, but this is not exactly the first. SMITH magazine published Six-Word Memoirs in Feb. 2008 and made the NYTimes Bestseller list. The book had almost 800 authors, each of whom received a copy.
Mostly correct. Only about half came from SA members, who were my fastest-adopting and highest-trafficking demographic upon launch. Their sense of humor also turned out to be quite a leap of unfathomable.
The monetization scheme was to publish the best works from that mode of literary production, and take a 10% cut while redistributing the rest out to all the co-authors involved. This anthology is the result of that first experiment. Every story (17 included) was written turn-by-turn, ranging from 2 to 10 authors. Compared to a paperback novel, this would total somewhere near 120 pages.
As for the content--well, it's definitely a reflection of Internet culture. :)