The project kicked off on February 1, when Penguin invited users across the world to help write a new novel. Each visitor was given the power to begin adding to Jane Eyre’s opening line (“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,”) and a few initial paragraphs. Starting with grad students from Leicester’s De Montfort University, a surge of traffic soon flooded into the “Million” Web site. Legions of bookish visitors quickly sent the company scrambling in search of new servers and shattered the novel’s narrative into countless bits. Characters began multiplying uncontrollably, story arcs sprawled in a hundred directions, and the quality of writing nosedived toward the incomprehensible. At one point, the book opened with the protagonist stretching the exclamation “Ooooow” across over a hundred characters. “What’s most interesting here is the process, not the final product,” says Mary Gannon, editor of Poets & Writers magazine.
Web-friendly authors had already embraced the notion of wiki-editing. Last year McKenzie Wark, author of “Gamer Theory,” a book about videogame culture due out in April, placed a draft of “Gamer” on the Web site for the Institute for the Future of the Book, in Brooklyn, New York. Hundreds of devoted gamers critiqued the draft and provided anecdotes, arguments and feedback. Only after incorporating their criticisms did Wark and his Harvard University Press editor give the book a final edit and send it off to the printer. Similarly, Lawrence Lessig’s “Code: Version 2.0,” an updated version of the Stanford professor’s 2000 classic, was released in December after being vetted and re-edited on a public wiki. “Nobody’s an expert on everything,” says Wark. “The author can be like a DJ, rather than the authority.”
The editor of Penguin’s wiki-novel, publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen, presides over a blog and tries to guide the novel’s daily direction. But he seems to have even less authority than a DJ. “We can only suggest,” he says. “The rest is up to them.”
