Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
I'm neither an author nor do I work in the publishing industry. However I do work in the software industry, and we've had that problem figured out for decades. When you have more than one person working on source, you must use some form of version control (and it's not a bad idea to use source control even if you're a one-man show, just because it's always useful to be able to branch off, experiment with changes, and still know that you can get back to the original if necessary). The more robust, the better, so that you can easily go back in time to back out bad changes, track who made what changes, see diffs, etc. It's a solvable problem with an entire industry proving that it works. There's no reason it can't or shouldn't be used for publishing.
|
I do this with my books. Word has both a change tracking feature which allows each user to put comments/changes in a different color, and then merge or unmerge as you so desire.
The base document sits all by it's lonesome, doing basically nothing for most of the time. The versions go out and play. Eventually they get merged together, with different changes as needed. Then the new, merged doc gets compared to the original, and then yet another new doc of the original and merged version gets made. That doc is then the one that gets to become the eventual book.
But at each step copies are kept. I might have seventeen versions of my novel before I get to the one I'm going to print from.