Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd will Drive the Future of Publishing

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor to Wired and author of the new book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

Howe not only wrote about crowdsourcing—the act of taking a job once performed by an employee and outsourcing it to a large, undefined group of people over the Internet—he also embodied it. His British publisher, Random House UK, held a crowdsourcing competition to design the dust jacket of his book. He also included published excerpts from the book on his blog, crowdsourcing.com in order to elicit critical comments from his readers. The most trenchant and insightful of the comments will be published as endnotes in an appendix to the book proper.

The idea is to create a book that contains multiple perspectives on a powerful, albeit controversial emerging phenomenon. And publishers should take note of Howe’s insights for harnessing such web-enabled authorial tactics.