The online book: team authors, and it's never finished

While Citizendium represents a small retreat, Sanger still believes in the power of radical collaboration. He credits open source computer programmers for demonstrating the greater efficiency of group work over that of lone geniuses.

"If we can manage to teach academics and people who are used to getting personal credit for their work [this new] way of collaborating, the result, I think, could very well be revolutionary in a real sense," Sanger says. "The result is an enormously efficient, exciting, and productive method of content development."

For those involved with Wark's book, a theoretical analysis of video games, the project was also about widening the doors of access to the writing process and making more transparent the debates that were once limited to a small circle of editors.

"The skills of an editor are not going to become unimportant; it's just that it is possible that the few hundred editors that work in publishing in New York City may not be the only people who have really good opinions about what's worthwhile in the world," says Jesse Wilbur with The Institute for the Future of the Book in New York.

He helped produce Wark's online book titled "GAM3R 7H30RY." (That's "Gamer Theory" for those who don't speak geek.) The book remains open at: www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory.

Some thinkers argue that while collaboration may work for an online encyclopedia, it's anathema to original works of art or scholarship, both of which require a point of view and an authorial voice.

"Novels, biography, criticism, political philosophy ... the books that we care about, those books are going to be in print for a very long time," says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The reason they aren't more jointly offered isn't that we haven't had technology to do it, it's that books represent a singular point of view."

Take three biographies of Noah Webster and you'll have three distinct lenses on the man's life, but an amalgam of the three would say virtually nothing, Mr. Nunberg argues.

"When people are using collaborative tools, they will naturally collaborate to a more neutral, less personal point of view," he adds. That homogenization kills originality and dulls a work. "The thing you can say about Wikipedia's articles is that they're always boring."

For many working in this arena, the excitement of collaboration comes perhaps less from the spark of the prose and more from the give-and-take of the discussion around a text. For online writers of the future, "their work is going to be judged by how interesting the conversation is," says Mr. Wilbur.

That demands a different skill set from authors, some of whom won't be as comfortable in this new medium.

"You have to be a certain kind of author to do this, and you have to be able to attract enough people to your site," says Ms. Berinstein. For writers of these new collaborative works, she says, there's a new version of the writer's age-old self-doubt: "What if I made a book and nobody came?"

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