Susan Orlean is writing her next book in Google Docs, rather than Microsoft Word--a revelation that created a fierce platform debate at the popular blog BoingBoing.

On her Twitter page, the author of The Orchid Thief noted how her hard drive had crashed recently, but Google Docs--a virtual word processor application that saves your work on Google's servers--had preserved her work. BoingBoing blogger and Google Docs fan Mat Honan investigated, discovering that the author did indeed use Google Docs as her primary word processor. Anybody else following her example?

Here's more from the post: "Ms. Orlean is not only a professional writer, she's a Serious Writer... A great writer*, even. Moreover, she writes books. My absolute longest documents run somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 words, at the outside. She's dealing with the tens of thousands." (Via Rumpus)