Tim O’Reilly discusses Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web” — and the context is his (and Sarah Milstein’s) new book about Twitter.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn’t imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn’t be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

This is very much my strategy with this book/website, though the things that change rapidly will change mostly here on the site, not in the printed version.

Evan Schnittman: Why Ebooks Must Fail

How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

What this means is that unless a very different model evolves, ebooks can never become the dominant version of content sold by book publishers. It means that ebooks will always be priced to sell, but sold as an afterthought, not as the primary version of a work. It means that the need for blended e plus p models will evolve, in order to take advantage of all the great qualities of ebooks, while providing the financial support and structure that print offers. It means that consumer ebooks, as a stand-alone version of an intellectual property, must fail.

This is a valuable lesson in book economics — 20th Century book economics, that is.

The key words in Schnittman’s piece (or at least the short portion I’ve quoted) are “huge advanced needed to buy books” — an assumption that we may need to challenge as the financial ecosystem of books, not just the distribution chain, evolves over time.

The huge advances themselves seem unsustainable. That’s a good thing, because they warp the marketplace.

Moreover, it’s unclear why publishers alone are expected to cover authors’ costs given that, at least in the case of much non-fiction, authors make money in ways other than selling books — namely consulting and speeches, among other things. Why shouldn’t the various parties in this ecosystem (a word I use deliberately) collaborate to sell books and other services and share revenues? Complex, sure, but worth it in the end.

ProPublica has launched the citizen-journalism portion of its operation, or at least the first iteration. By posting The Obama Team’s Disclosure Documents and asking readers to help figure out any potential conflicts of interest or other facts that are worth knowing, the site is doing what newspapers could have been doing years ago but haven’t bothered to do. This crowdsourcing follows key early journalistic adopters, notably Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo.

Amanda Michel is leading ProPublica’s citizen component. This is a great start.