There is fulltilt poker

I’m probably divulging some of my product ideas but since I’ve not producticed them for more than a year, here it is! :-)

There are many publishing companies and I have reviewed some books for a few. They either send documents through email or let people download the documents from the publisher’s site. There is no easy way (for reviewers) to review book/articles. I’ve usually created a review document mentioning the page/line number and then commenting but I’ve always thought that this was not optimal way to do.

Bruce Eckel pioneered reviewing books on a large scale by releasing(for free) his draft copies of his books long before they got printed. A trick he used in books like “Thinking in Java” had a hyperlink at the end of every paragraph (clicking would launch your email app referring to a particular page and paragraph number). I am not sure how Bruce collated them together for his updates, but I’m thinking that it was not so easy.

People like Linus Torvals regularly look at changes to the linux kernel(patches) and merge(similar to merging in MS-WORD) the changes back to the original sources(head).

Shouldn’t there be an easy way to let authors look at user reviews and merge them back to the original ? It should also be easy to recruit reviewers provided the reviewing process was easier than today.

When I see books (from my friends’ who major in chemistry and Health), they are very content rich — text formatted in all sorts of ways, pictures, graphs, charts and I’m sure it takes a lot of time to get a good quality result. I’m sure all sorts of industries will appreciate an improvement in the time it takes to turn out books. One way is the BETA book program from pragmatic programmers(and others) but even these programs send out PDFs to the reviewers(readers).

Isn’t there a better way ?

BR,
~A

I came across another product called Live Document which offer the entire gamut of document sharing functionality (including approvals) from within Microsoft Office – no need to upload a document or convert it to HTML…I found one particular feature interesting – where document changes are automatically updated across all copies of the document…still needs some work but has a lot of potential…

Approver.com isn’t a “word processing” application like Writely is. It’s not intended to replace the application you use today to create content (although you can edit in the browser if you like).

Thanks for the link, Om, we’ve had a very interesting morning over on the site. :)

IMHO Writely has gotten closer to getting it right than anyone else, but people still seem to be hung up on word processing rather than focusing on the content.