Here are the slides from another presentation I gave at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference: Rapid and Participatory Publishing. In this presentation I discuss two cases of traditional book publishers who have leveraged the Web to enhance and extend their publishing efforts. These models are a great fit for most associations that have existing publishing operations. The short-form ebook model could also be a good option for an organization looking to get into book publishing.
I have an article discussing this material forthcoming in ASAE’s Journal of Association Leadership. The new issue with my article should be out this month.
C. David Gammel, CAE 
I would have loved to have attended this session Dave! I don’t know how I missed it but I can say that just reviewing your slides planted a number of ideas that would be beneficial to my organization and others like it who are looking for new ways to leverage their online communities and have them demonstrate thought leadership through collaborative efforts.
A question that comes to mind though, not directly related to the idea itself but rather the culture of the organizations who would try to do something like this. How do you make it work in all organizations. I see this approach as much more appealing to organizations that are more agile, smaller and more resource constrained as opposed to those that are larger, more global and bureaucratic. So while it may work for some of our component organizations I could never see it even being considered for use at the higher organizational level because of who we are, what we do, and who our customers are.
I’m not sure if it is arrogance, fear or the WHADITW attitude keeping us from embracing more progressive and innovative types of approaches to many tasks, but I do know that we are probably missing out on a number of great opportunities.
Dave, you put your finger on one of the key things I highlighted in the session: the biggest challenge to making this happen is going to be changing your existing processes. The technology is the easiest part of the whole approach.
I do think it is possible to do this kind of innovation even in old, sclerotic, organizations. The key to selling it is to emphasize the value of the outcomes rather than the changes you’ll have to make. Another approach is to ask forgiveness rather than permission. 🙂
I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts on how Rosenfeld Media compares to these cases of established publishers. Their theory is that books on user experience topics should be created with user experience methodologies. They aren’t focusing on rapid creation, but the niche area, use of feedback, short length, and availability of ebook versions seem very comparable to your examples. Are they likely to see the same benefits?
My personal disappointment with RM is that it has taken so long for their first books to come out. (I want to read them!) I would rather they had the content out faster.
Going short and slow seems to be the worst of both worlds, even if they are baking in a lot of community feedback.