This is cool but I'm not sure if it's really publishing nor is it something new. I help manage a large publishers proprietary platform for online textbooks. We

This is cool but I'm not sure if it's really publishing nor is it something new. I help manage a large publishers proprietary platform for online textbooks. We use svn to hold all of our books. We then serve them to their site in an online reading app. If we were to remove the front end and point users to our svn repo I doubt one could call that publishing. Sure we would be providing informtion, but until we add the wrapper that makes it useful, it is not published. Could you call an unbound book published? Providing that platform for reading creates more value for the user. It also makes it easier for the author to pass their value through their publisher to the reader.