First Beta software, now Beta books

O'Reilly, the technical book publisher has a feature called Roughcuts online. They publish books on new web programming, technology, and hardware. Roughcuts are like “beta” versions of books, similar to Google Labs which are their list of beta products. With Roughcuts, people who want to preview the book pay a fee for the pre-production PDF file, and then receive the hard copy when it is shipped.

Newspapers often post their printed articles a day or so before the printing, but now with books being released 'beta', it looks like the publishing world is changing in the near future to get feedback before releasing the book to the general public.