Early access to a book's development
O'Reilly's 'Rough Cuts' are a great idea - books in progress that you can subscribe to as they develop.
Here's one for Google's SketchUp app.
This open authoring progress seems to have become an established model for tech publishing; Pragmatic Programmers have their 'beta' books that offer immediate access to early draft PDFs along with the finished book.
An interesting trend (there a bunch of examples of this 'early access' model by individual authors...'The Search' and others who elude me at this late stage).
I'm thinking less of Open Publishing, where multiple people author a book, but the way authors and publishers are selling access to the process.
Early access clearly lends itself well to the tech publishing genre. I'm sure this approach has been taken with fiction (I just don't know examples), and I'd love to see this open model, expanded with access to research notes, early outlines, removed chapters etc. for non-fiction works (Gladwell's books would make fantastic candidates).
(rough Cuts link from a tweet by Nicole.)
