For nonfiction e-books and paper titles: Where to deposit the documentation?

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By David Rothman

 Phony memoirs and other frauds are bad news for the publishing industry, whatever the medium—E or P.

The typical nonfiction book undergoes less fact-checking than articles in major magazines.

But what if publishers in many cases required writers to deposit their documentation for perusal—either immediately or in the future? And perhaps even more usefully, what if the files would then be available others writing on the same topic?

The new DocumentCloud project is working toward the latter goal, shared documentation, for media organizations and eventually others. In this case the participating sites will house the material on their own servers.  From  the DocumentCloud site—via PersonaNonData:

DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web. Users will be able to search for documents by date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do "document dives," collaboratively examining large sets of documents. Organizations will be able to do all this while keeping the documents–and readers–on their own sites. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents.

Thought: A lot of this could happen through the networked book concept, even without the DocumentCloud approach in use. In another words, the documents in a sense would be built into the book, via links to the appropriate sites—ideally persistent links, with persistent archives. And speaking of persistence, that would be one of the weaknesses of the DocumentCloud project unless there is suitable backup. I’ll be upbeat. Founders (photo) come from such heavy-hitting organizations as the New York Times and ProPublica. See FAQ.

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