Devoted to technical writing and technical writers

Safari U is a service of O'Reilly Media that offers professors a chance to build their own textbook by adding content sections from other O'Reilly publications. The CIO over there, CJ Rayhill, explains it better than I could:

"Over the past few years, as we've converted our books to digital formats, we realized that the shift from paper to pixels opened up a host of new possibilities for delivering information," said CJ Rayhill, SafariU General Manager. "Just as iTunes made it possible for music fans to find and build playlists of songs from many albums, SafariU lets trainers and educators remix, add to, and assemble digital chunks of information into a unique package. It's designed to take full advantage of three classic disruptive technologies that are now converging: digital information, print-on-demand, and web services."

So what does this mean for technical writers? Well, a few things. If you've written a book for O'Reilly, or are planning to write one, you should consider negotiating a royalty payment or flat fee for making your content re-usable. I'm not an attorney, but I[m willing to bet that this is not covered under the Fair use provision of the U.S. Copyright Act.

Frankly, technical writers are going to have to find ways to adapt to the changes coming with XML and out-sourcing, not to mention other innovations in this Web 2.0 environment.  In fact, I'm outlining a book proposal on the subject as we speak.