One of the most anticipated books of the year, Andrew McAfee's seminal tome on Enterprise 2.0 has been scheduled for a December 2009 release, pointedly late in the publishing season, even though it's already complete. This underscores how traditional publishers just don't work at today's market pace.
Harvard Business Publishing, which will be issuing Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges, has pushed off the release of this book during one of the most important periods in social computing history as up to half of businesses today are actively dealing with the implications of emergent collaboration and knowledge management with Web 2.0 tools.
The timeliness of the book from the the person who identified the Enterprise 2.0 concepts to the world -- and coined the term itself -- cannot be overstated.
Professor McAfee wrote recently on his blog:
I'd love to see it published tomorrow (heck, yesterday). But I'm also hugely ignorant about the best ways to publicize and otherwise support a mainstream business book (and even though Enterprise 2.0 has a technology focus, both HBP and I consider it to be a mainstream business book). I understand that it's important to get it reviewed in newspapers and magazines, to line up interviews, to not flood bookstores with too many books at once from the same publisher, and so on. HBP knows how to do all these things much better than I do, so I have to give them a good deal of deference when they counsel patience and tell me the book will do better if it's released at the right time instead of at the earliest possible opportunity.
However, the Enterprise 2.0 wave is extremely fast moving and many in the business social computing space have expressed concerns that the material will become dated in this time period. Enterprise 2.0 maven Susan Scrupski had this to say on her blog as part of her creating a Facebook group to urge HBP to get the book to market in a timely fashion, in a post titled "The Urgency of Now":
The demand for Andy's book is today, not six months from now. I'm wondering if, as a community, we can lobby Harvard Business Press to move the publication date up as its value is inextricably tied to its timeliness, especially in this fast-moving space. The Editorial Director in charge of the publication timeline is Jacqueline Murphy. I urge you to contact her and express your support for moving the book up in Harvard Business Press' publishing queue. I also started a Facebook group with the same goal.
It remains to be seen if the book's publication date will change but today's topical information travels at literally light speed across the planet and between people using today's social computing environments in the home and at work. The invaluable insights and information contained in professor McAfee's book will not benefit the world at large for another half a year, in the meantime the business world will have changed immeasurably via the very tools the book covers in depth.
While traditional publishing will inevitably have a future of some kind, the inability of old world media to deal with the changes in the time cycles and delivery modes of information show why Enterprise 2.0 -- specifically the power it puts into anyone's hands to distribute information collaboratively (instead of one way) -- is seemingly ushering in a world where publishers of the 20th century simply can't compete.
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