The Perfect And The Good Enough: Books And Wikis

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted to my blog for an entire month. I have a good excuse: I just finished the final edits on my forthcoming book, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith[1], due out early next year. (I realized too late that I could have capitalized on Da Vinci Code fever and called the book The God Code, thus putting an intellectual and cultural history of Victorian mathematics in the hands of numerous unsuspecting Barnes & Noble shoppers.) The process of writing a book has occasionally been compared to pregnancy and childbirth; as the awe-struck husband of a wife who bore twins, I suspect this comparison is deeply flawed. But on a more superficial level, I guess one can say that it’s a long process that produces something of which one can be very proud, but which can involve some painful moments. These labor pains are especially pronounced (at least for me) in the final phase of book production, in which all of the final adjustments are made and tiny little errors (formatting, spelling, grammar) are corrected. From the “final” draft of a manuscript until its appearance in print, this process can take an entire year. Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thought-provoking article on the production of the Wikipedia[2], just published in the Journal of American History, was apropos: it got me thinking about the value of this extra year of production work on printed materials and its relationship to what’s going on online now.