Read-Only Preferred

In his post The Future of Publishing is Writeable, Terry Jones engages in some interesting speculation. He predicts a coming time in which publishing is fragmented into smaller, often-serialized, chunks; self-publishing is ascendant; and every reader is an active participant in the creation process.

There is no doubt that these things are possible--look at sites like fanfiction.net, which have been publishing user-created content for years, or the self-publishing programs run by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and SmashWords.

However, it seems to me much likelier that all of the trends Jones mentions will exist in tandem with more traditional publishing norms, rather than replacing them.  There is still a need for both authority and recognized talent.

Take the concept of authority...  If a researcher publishes her findings on an important breakthrough, I want to read it in her words, exactly as she presents it.  If she includes her data for me to peruse, so much the better, but she is the expert.  I simply do not want for her research article to be re-edited by anyone and everyone who thinks they have a different interpretation.  That is why the scientific process publishes a version of record, and then other scientists can publish their opinions, under their own professional names, through recognized channels--letters to the journal, for example, or additional research that reproduces, builds upon, or refutes the original work.

Then there is the concept of talent.  As appealing as the concept of a living, growing work of fiction may be, I suspect most of us want to be entertained, and we want some assurance that the entertainment will be worth the investment of our limited time.  Thus the author as brand-name would seem to me to trump the concept of group authorship.  This Forbes article on author and series branding contains a good discussion of how book sales are linked to audience loyalty, which may be built through big-money promotions or through social media such as GoodReads.

Finally, there is Jones' prediction of fragmentation.  I think that in popular media, there may be ever less patience for this.  As MetaDamen pointed out, binge viewing is on the rise, perhaps to the detriment of relatively serialized media like broadcast television.  Even cases where longer works have been broken into smaller chunks are often more closely related to monetization or the perception that the standard-sized container is not sufficient to do justice to the content (Hobbit trilogy, anyone?).  The one case where this argument might be made is the scholarly monograph, particularly where multiple authors wrote the various chapters.  Where these chapters are separately indexed, assigned DOIs, and made available as PDFs, they may as well be separate publications, albeit with a unifying theme.