To say that all books will soon be wiki-style books is no doubt an exaggeration, but the day is surely coming when a significant proportion of books will have some wiki-component. A number of books are already being made available for wiki-style editing and elaboration after the “first edition” is published and we are now seeing the first generation of books that are the product of large-scale wiki-style collaborations.

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, for example, has toyed with the idea of publishing hard-cover Wikipedia books such as “Wikipedia’s Guide to the History of Rock ‘n Roll”. The idea is that Wikipedia users will collaboratively create the text and then lock-in a high-quality version that could be published in traditional book format. Yochai Benkler put his entire book (The Wealth of Networks) into wiki-format and invited interested readers to modify and extend the text. My own book Wikinomics (co-authored with Don Tapscott) will have several chapters available in wiki-format on www.wikinomics.com when it is released in January 2007, including the Wikinomics Playbook, a peer-produced guide to 21st century strategy and management.

Now, in a similar effort, Wharton Business School is teaming up with MIT’s Sloan School of Management to publish the first full-fledged business management book to be written Wiki style. It’s called We Are Smarter Than Me (fall 2007) and the project is spearheaded by Barry Libert, cofounder of WeAreSmarter.org and CEO of Shared Insights. Libert hopes he can extend the project to develop a series of wiki-books on management and community. So far 900 people have signed on to be part of the networked book collaboration, but Libert wants up to 2 million potential authors to get involved. Visit the website if you’d like to pitch in.