all talk and no action

This is a really interesting idea. According to the O'Reilly Radar weblog, Rael Dornfest, Chief Technology Officer at O'Reilly Media, wanted a "Web 2.0-style" way of creating the Hacks books it publishes. In other words, he wanted a system that would allow a group of people to participate in the process of researching, writing and editing the books, so he came up with a collaborative editing tool called Aardvark.

The result of this is that you can now buy four in-progress Hacks books as Rough Cuts, where you can get access to the work-in-progress, and send comments on the book to writers and editors to help shape the final product.

Here's a bit more info from the O'Reilly site:

Rough Cuts titles live up to their name - they haven't been fully edited, subjected to final technical review, or formatted for print. In other words, they'll be very current, but they won't be pretty.