The Greatest Story Every Told

December 18, 2007 6:37 PM

Could you publish a book out of Yahoo Answers / Groups etc. and make it successful? I think it would be wicked to give one of those sites or the Green a good editorial scrub and create a tome filled with great nuggets of fact, reality, belief, and opinion. How would you structure the business?

If something like AskMefi was a book, what chapters / topics would you cover? Is it a viable business model to compensate communities / web site owners in exchange for the rights to publish their intellectual property on paper?

posted by jasondigitized to Law & Government (5 answers total)

It's much easier to use one of these sites for "research" than to formally use the content.
posted by smackfu at 6:39 PM on December 18, 2007

You'd have some thorny copyright issues to deal with, depending on the site. I remember years ago when Jon Katz was planning on publishing a book based on some post-Columbine Slashdot threads. I don't remember all the details, or whether the book was published, but there was a good deal of uproar from some who commented on the threads and didn't want this guy publishing their work.
posted by i love cheese at 7:24 PM on December 18, 2007

look closely at the bottom right of your screen:

© 1999-2007 MetaFilter Network LLC
All posts are © their original authors.

"communities / web site owners," unless they have extraordinarily unfair TOS, do not own the comments their users make.
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:26 PM on December 18, 2007

I agree with i love cheese, in most cases the copyrights remain with the person who wrote the post, not with the "communities / web site owners".

This comment is a good example. If I remember correctly, I don't think I gave up any my copyrights when I joined Ask MetaFilter. If so, then you can't use this comment without my permission, even if the web site owners say it is OK.

Here's an excellent article that explains it better than I can:

10 Big Myths about copyright explained
posted by 14580 at 7:48 PM on December 18, 2007

This book was assembled from the posts to a web forum I frequent. I wasn't involved in putting it together, but I believe it took a lot of work as they went through the archives to collect all the questions and answers they wanted to use, and then emailed everyone involved to get their permission to publish and what name they wanted to be known under. The proceeds went to charity, so no compensation was involved.

Asking everyone involved in AskMeFi threads would be even more work, and if it was intended to make a profit it would be even mroe difficult to decide what to offer for their comments.
posted by penguinliz at 9:39 AM on December 19, 2007