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The music community has done a pretty good job of determining ways in which the online world can be used for marketing and networking purposes. While the collaborative effort has yet to grow as technological advances make their way into web-based media-creation services, there are a number of ways in which social media and networking can be achieved on the Web, especially when it comes to finding ways in which e-commerce can be leveraged for empowering musicians to become autonomous in the larger marketplace.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]A few initiatives have started down similar paths for other forms of media, including writing. Wired, for instance, worked with a collaborative writing project that resulted in an article for the publication. Even novels have been made with a wiki, crowdsourcing mentality in mind.
WEbook is one of those organizations looking to the community for the creation of a collaborative piece of work, and now WEbook is launching a platform to do just that. Launching its public beta today, WEbook is hoping to form a following around community-sourced content, with a commerce segment attached to the collaborative effort.
Funded by Greylock Partners and other individual investors, WEbook is creating an online destination site that also acts as a marketplace for creators to earn revenue from their work. In selling content across established stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, WEbook's "Pandora" project will be a collaborative work that's sold in the mainstream markets. Additionally, WEbook is adopting another recently popularized model in the media sector and will be giving away some of its content for free, via mobile phones (get it here).
Will this model work? As publishers are hesitant to adopt such models, and even more still shy away from web-based distribution methods for sales, WEbook is hoping to become a leader in this particular movement, which is already permeating other forms of the media industry. Even without the collaborative effort, Amazon and other services have become standards for the self-publishing sector.