Excellent story. Thanks for the share, blasdel. 
The wall street journal had an interesting article on this subject, as does Leo from Zenhabits.net<p>I recently decided to undergo a similar writing experiment on the concept of focus (<a href="http://howtogetfocused.com/" rel="nofollow">http://howtogetfocused.com/</a>) in which I use a technique that's like a freemium model...<p>This philosophy centers on the following characteristics:<p>Writing the book using a blogging platform (I’m using Wordpress)
Listing one main author, and listing many contributing authors (you, the reader, are a contributing author if you comment)
Releasing the book 100% for free online (and selling the offline format)
Sourcing the book’s editor to the readers (Readers comment on each chapter suggesting spelling changes, organization changes, ideas and illustrations
Crowd-sourcing the book’s design