Douglas Rushkoff is releasing his latest novel, The Exit Strategy, for free online. This is a collaborative project. People reading the book can add to it online, through footnotes and comments. But although the author is billing it as an Open Source book, the original author is the one who reaps the profits in the end. All author's US royalties will be donated to the Free Software Foundation and the EFF

It looks like an interesting experiment in collaborative story making. Pretending these papers are historical documents discovered in the future creates the perfect medium in which to seamlessly annotate and comment as readers.

As an application of Open Source outside of programming, however, I think it falls short. But as a book it looks pretty darn good so far, and it is all for free online, so Open Source or not, why not have a read? Besides, a completely Open Source book really just means framing a discussion board, shared blog, or wiki, eh? So, confining "collaborators" to adding comments is a good start.