A more efficient way to get your press material approved

Last week U.S. News interviewed Clay Shirky about his new book, Here Comes Everybody. Shirky talked about the benefits of wikis (like Google Docs) versus email -- Google Docs allows multiple users to edit a document at one time, whereas sending out an email will result in receiving multiple opinions that need to be incorporated into that one document.

To put it more concretely for us book publicists, let's say you've written a press release and need to give it to your director, the editor and the author for approval. If they either hand write changes or email them to you, you have three sets of changes to incorporate, which means not only entering the changes, but also double checking them to make sure you haven't made any mistakes. Using Google Docs, everyone can make their changes online and you simply export the final product.

Many publishing folk have yet to utilize even the "Track Changes" function in Microsoft Word, though, so I think editing in Google Docs may be a little ways off ...