Open Feedback Publishing
The Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) is an O'Reilly experiment that tries to bridge the gap between private manuscripts and public blogs. Following on the let-them-comment-on-everything model established by the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others), OFPS allows readers to read in-progress O'Reilly manuscripts, communicate suggestions with the authors, follow others' comments, and directly participate in the development of new books.
Manuscripts developed with OFPS sites allow the authors to publish the in-progress work as whenever they think it's ready for public comment and then update the site with new versions as the text is improved. Authors note sections of the text that they'd like comments on (potentially down to an individual paragraph) and that allows readers on the site to comment on that particular section.
You can add a new comment on a section by clicking on the "No comments yet" link under the section itself, or participate in an ongoing discussion with other readers by clicking "19 comments."
If you'd like to see all of the comments added to a page, click "Show all comments" at the top.
If you'd like to follow the stream of comments, just add either an individual chapter's feed or the whole book's feed to your feedreader. Each comment will be added to the feed with a little bit of context from the book.
Because we'd like to be able to credit commenters in the book and want to foster a constructive dialog, we require users to register and sign in before adding new comments. If you'd just like to read, there's no need to register. "Register" and "Sign-in" links are at the top of each page.
Your contributions and submissions to any OFPS site are made under the same license as the book. See the standard O'Reilly Terms of Service for the details.
Please send feedback or bug reports about the OFPS system to labs@oreilly.com.
Programming Scala is the first OFPS site.
Programming Scala, along with a large number of other in-progress O'Reilly manuscripts, is also available as part of the Rough Cuts program from Safari Books Online.
Are you planning to release OFPS as an Open Source project?
@Laisvunas: As I mentioned on the blog post, OFPS isn't open source today, although we're discussing that internally.
I have the offer to make your books more interactive. I have patents for this decision. Your publishing house can be interested?
When commenting on OFPS system, the system is displaying
the real name instead of only the user name (despite to the
statement on the register form "Your username will be
displayed with your comments, and your name will be used
for crediting your contribution.")
Is there a way to see a list of only the comments in chapter order or date order with links to the original content? This would allow one to see only the comments or new comments and replies to recent comments.
@Derek: You can get two Atom feeds which may help, either the whole book or just a single chapter.
This may be an experiment for O'Reilly, but your wording ("...is an O'Reilly experiment") without further attribution kind of makes it sound like it's an original O'Reilly idea. That is a bit impolite.
You should give credit to Bruce Eckel, who pioneered this idea and the style of having a comment link next to each paragraph. For him, I'm guessing, it went far beyond an experiment, because his books were very successful and thoroughly debugged by the time they went to press.
The "whole book feed" is about 5 days out of date, which makes it a less than compelling feature.
@William: The order of the book feed is just wrong. If you go to the "last" page, you'll see the most recent comments. I'll try to fix the serialization bug soon.
@Keith I'm still voting for out of date. The most recent post to the http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/index.html full book feed seems to be from 10/13/2009.
@William: Any improvement now?
So far, so good... latest update I see: 10/29. Thanks for looking in to it!
Hello. If I want to translate book under Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS), can I free publish my work?