The Penguins Are Coming!

This is no joke. I firmly believe that once an idea takes hold, it's going to flourish, no matter what. This particular mess started with Penguin books launching their colloborative book project "A Million Penguins." More on this bunch of penguins later, but today I stumbled onto another similar project in the works - A Writers Year. Guess what? Both projects are based in the United Kingdom.

While it would give me infinite pleasure to recount the magnificient online projects unrolled by the British ( Operation Clark County comes to mind ), it would be unfair to declare the penguin and similar episodes a disaster at this early stage. I mean, just the fact that thousands ( if not a million ) people, have co-written the book, will generate a lot of buzz. And in today's buzz-oriented world, the one with the most buzz hogs the NYT best seller list. Point is, what's the future after the novelty wears off? If there's a hundred similar projects going on, and a dozen new collaborative books out every month, who's going to interested? End of the day, the books will sell based on the content. So, it might be fair to analyze if a wiki-book will be better than a book by a single author, all other factors being the same.

The obvious advantages -
Abundance of talent and ideas, and the best will remain, while run-of-the-mill passages will be stricken out by informed writers.
Speed - If enough people are working on it, and they get the hang of it, an army of writers could churn out a book in a mtter of days. They could flood the market with their books, and hope for the best.
Money - Pretty soon, someone is going to start making money out of this, and then it'll be time for all the would-be penguins to jump in and demand their slice of the igloo.
The Blog effect - Today, it's difficult to differentiate between readers and writers of blogs, and generally speaking, they're one and the same. It's likely that the penguin thing is going to end up the same, with readers, book buyers and writers all ending up hopelessly mixed.

Anyway, let's hope the book world is not invaded by an army of penguins, and for once, the well-meaning British didn't screw up the works.