Note: Our usual end of the week gig, the FringeHog Friday Five is back after a brief interruption. My new year’s resolution to travel less worked fabulously until exactly the first week of February, at which point back-to-back road trips derailed the semi-normalcy I was just becoming accustomed to.  But we should be back on schedule.  Almost.

FringeHog Friday Five: Future Bestsellers

I like to think of FringeHog as a mental whiteboard; a space to play with ideas that may not be ready for prime time and a way to indulge my inner writer.  And apparently I’m not the only one: a growing share of bloggers are using their blogs as drafting boards for their upcoming books.  Why blog your book?  Lots of reasons: to mark your intellectual territory; to translate mindshare into market share when the book hits the stores; or in Jeff Howe’s case, to prove your point.

Watching these future atoms start out as neo-bytes is a voyeuristic dream. It’s another example of making the invisible visible: we’re offered a glimpse (although sometimes not a pretty one) into the writer’s thought process.  So if you’re the type of person who shows up to the movies early just to watch the trailers, then this post is for you, because this week’s Friday Five looks at future books-in-the-making.  Will any of these be The Next Big Idea?  You decide.  (Thanks to Bruno G. for the suggestions)

Chris Anderson: FREE (Due out: mid-2008)

In this follow up to The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (editor of Wired) takes a look the many ways to make money by giving things away for free.  The book is aptly titled FREE (subtitles under consideration include: FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing). Blog posts tagged with the title include a rich assortment of “free” experiments including: music , books and even cars.  Anderson even gets in on the gig himself, with some not-too-shabby free publicity, compliments of this month’s cover story in Wired. 

Charles Leadbeater: We-Think (Due out: March 2008 in the UK)

Charles Leadbeater’s thesis is that “new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.” Leadbeater puts the theory to the test in his new book, We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. With the support of his publisher, Leadbeater is releasing the book in its entirety online (prior to formal publication) so that “people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it.” Each chapter is profiled, and next to it a running list of comments by readers. 

Kevin Kelly:  The Technium  (Due Out: ??)

Kevin Kelly describes the Technium as “a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” Since November 2004 he’s been blogging about the Technium; his posts are thought-provoking and far-reaching, from Humans are the sex organs of technology to the inevitability of lifelogging, to the four stages in the Internet of things. All explore Kelly’s view of the Technium as an extended face of technology, as a whole system with its own dynamics. It will be interesting to see how he ties these together into a book but in the meantime, watching it unfold from Kelly’s mind reminds me of the television series Lost; the plot is complex and overlapping, often paradoxical and filled with unforgettable narrative.

Jeff Howe: Crowdsourcing (Due out: July 2008)

If veteran writer Charles Leadbeater is the Pro, then first-time author Jeff Howe is the Amateur.  Which makes it all the more interesting to see how the two authors approach the same topic.  What Leadbeater refers to as “We Think”, Howe more descriptively calls “Crowdsourcing.” His book, Crowdsourcing:  Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, is an extension of his June 2006 article in Wired in which he described the rise of mass collaboration as an economic tipping point.  In a nod to the editorial wisdom of crowds, selections of Howe’s book are (also) being released online for review and he promises to publish the “most salient, witty or astute remarks” as an appendix in the final chapter. The first chapter to be released can be found here.

Mobile Novelists: It ws bst f tms, it ws wrst f tms…

In Japan, writing a novel on a blog has become positively passé.   Just in case you missed the story, Japan’s biggest book distributor Tohan recently reported that of the 10 best-selling novels in 2007, five were originally “mobile novels” (”keitai shosetsu” in Japanese) - stories written for downloading on cell phones before being (re)published in book form.  Mobile novels (typically short stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging) have seen explosive growth: in 2003 sales of mobile novels were worth 1.8 billion yen; in 2006 the figure was 9.4 billion. Experts say the growth is due to a change in business models; when Japan’s mobile phone providers starting offering unlimited data for flat monthly rates, sales skyrocketed.  Download sites like Maho no-i-rando have hundreds of thousands of novels listed; increasingly many of those are finding their way into book form, putting the next bestseller, um, under your thumb.