Crowd Accelerated Innovation and eBooks

This month’s Wired features an article by Chris Anderson of TED (not to be confused with editor-in-chief Chris Anderson) on what he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation. It follows Clay Shirky’s thesis that the massive increase in online access for communities of variant sizes brings changes in kind, not just degree. Anderson uses dance as an example, pointing to rapid advancement of style and new moves once online video became ubiquitous (in the first world, but still): thanks to YouTube, six year olds can memorize moves by bleeding-edge choreographers.

Here’s his own TED talk about it:

Now, he stresses the importance of online video to this development. He saw TED talks get better as speakers reviewed past highlights and worked to advance the format.

While this is all well and good, and overlaps plenty with Steven Johnson’s recent work, I’d like to investigate how Crowd Accelerated Innovation informs the ebook sector of trade publishing.

Books as Weather: Or, Help Me Out

On a particularly dismal day in February, I posted a few book covers that reflected the weather outside my office. Why can’t we code this for all weather conditions?

Here’s my idea: replace standard weather icons with book covers and tether to relevant data in Google’s or Yahoo’s weather API. Then you can spit out the xml into some handy code for literary-minded bloggers to add to their sites.

Think of this:

Replaced with these:

Cool, right? I figure all we would need to do is pair book covers with standard weather nomenclature, and then someone could do the coding. And by someone, I mean not me: I don’t even pretend to be a coder.

But I can pair book covers. Here are a few based on Yahoo’s weather conditions: