A Book with Ten Thousand Authors?

The internet is an amazing place: a place with the capacity to change the way that we live, work and think. Instant downloads and file sharing have revolutionized the music industry; YouTube and its ilk are set to do the same for film. Literature, however, has yet to be impacted in the same way. That, at least, is the view of the UK author Chris Baker.

"Blogging has been an important development," he tells us, "but it is essentially a new medium that writers are using to do what they have always done - share their thoughts with the world."

Baker's own solution is to be found in his community writing project, "I want a word", based at the website www.iwantaword.com. Through this site Baker is looking for ten thousand people to each contribute a word of their choice to the project. When all ten thousand words have been submitted, Baker will add some more words of his own and create a single, coherent story. If he fails to receive ten thousand contributions by the end of 2008, Baker will close the project to new submissions and write the book using the words submitted up to that point.

"This felt like a really good way to get people involved in the writing of a novel," says Baker "and I think the end result could be something really special, something genuinely unique."

A quick look at the myspace page that Baker has set up for the project reveals a widely supportive response to the idea, although there have been some notable exceptions, mostly focussing on the fact that Baker is charging contributors £1 for the right to submit a word to his project. Baker's justification for the charge is that it forces people to think more carefully about their choice of word, and discourages spammers and other malicious users, as well as helping to cover the running cost of the project. Is that a convincing enough justification? I guess that is a question to which only time can reveal the answer, but in response to the criticism, Baker has elaborated further: