9 ms·

GitBook: A modern publishing toolchain

172 points by lobo_tuerto 12y ago

georgecalm 12y ago
I really like the the simplicity of the plugin system. Adding (Ka)TeX support, for example, was just a matter of few clicks. Creating plugins looks straight-forward too; you can extend the site or filter / decorate text. This makes me want to use GitBook. If they don't support an idea I know I'd be able to write a plugin for it. And with time and their steady growth I probably wouldn't even have to. Sure, it's very new and has bugs, but I think this has a lot of potential.
atmosx 12y ago
Anyone tried to write a non-english book using gitbook?
- bpesquet 12y ago
  Yes, and it works fine (example : https://www.gitbook.com/book/bpesquet/programmation-orientee-objet-csharp/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/bpesquet/programmation-orientee...). You can even write multi-languages books.
- AaronO 12y ago
  GitBook co-founder here. We have a lot of non-english books actually: https://www.gitbook.com/explore https://www.gitbook.com/explore, over a thousand in chinese alone. In the upcoming 2.0.0 release, we've further improved internationalisation: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/tree/master/theme/i18n https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/tree/master/theme/i18n We automatically detect your book's language (or you can specify itself) and so then the build chain can automatically use translations for menu entries etc ... if available in your language.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    My mother-tongue is Greek. I can imagine it's not your top priority. I will test the waters hopefully somewhere before summer :-) Thanks for the reply.
  - progman 12y ago
    Will Hebrew also be supported? With vowel points? I could simulate such letters with icons but I wonder if they look acceptable on different devices (iOS, kindle etc.)
bkanber 12y ago
Really interesting idea. I think this has the potential to grow into a real publishing platform, but also think that their name might hurt them. "GitBook" is very techie, and the name and the git-geared UX might be a hurdle towards moving past early adopters.
- ejp 12y ago
  My thoughts exactly. The larger target market here is authors in general, with tech-savvy git users who also happen to write books as a much smaller subset. It might behoove you to hide git in the background, as I suspect they do here: https://draftin.com/about https://draftin.com/about
- lobo_tuerto 12y ago
  I think it doesn't really hurt, on the contrary, because of the name it might attract the _techie people_ and become the de facto publishing platform for all sorts of technical books.
- grey-area 12y ago
  Very few non-developers are going to use git unfortunately, so I doubt they are limiting their market.
  - detaro 12y ago
    Pure git directly, no. But a nice GUI system with git (or another VCS) under the hood could work quite well. People in the publishing industry at least already understand the concepts of versioning, diffs and merges, it's just that existing tools are optimized for code, not text.
    - tragic 12y ago
      That's part of it, yes. But code at the end of the day is just text, and at least the github interface is able to do word-by-word diffs. That ought, in the end, to be enough. The other issue is that non-technical people, in my experience, prefer to do their writing using software that does not bounce out VCS-friendly files, eg Word. Also, the terminology of git is somewhat abstruse to the novice. It's a shame, because I can anecdotally think of one or two occasions where decent version control would have really, really, really helped in managing publications.
captn3m0 12y ago
I'm using gitbook to write a book currently (so I'm biased), but its an excellent platform for writers (especially those familiar with git). My best bits: - Most of the product is open-source, which means I can tinker with their publishing platform. - Version control - Markdown support - Mailing lists for readers (so you can send email updates) - Support for donations and selling (I'm not using it, though) - A traffic email sent every week - Builds are pretty fast - They even offer an educational discount on the pro plans if you ask nicely. A few issues I've faced: - The traffic stats are not realistic. It counts page loads, which are down by a factor of 2-3 as per my google analytics. Also, the country demographics are very clearly wrong (unless there is a readership of my book in Philippines that I don't know of) - Landing page customization. They do have a few options, but I'd like more options If there is someone who has tried both softcover.io (by Michael Hartl) and gitbook, I'd like to hear their thoughts.
srinivasupadhya 12y ago
GoCD moved its user & developer docs to GitBook. user docs: http://www.go.cd/documentation/user/current/ http://www.go.cd/documentation/user/current/ dev docs: http://www.go.cd/documentation/developer/ http://www.go.cd/documentation/developer/ and its been great so far! The best feature by far is fast & accurate search.
transfire 12y ago
Pricing model doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Just charge royalties for books sold. Why charge per month at all? If worried about many people starting books and never publishing then a small annual free should be enough to weed those out.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  > Just charge royalties for books sold. Why charge per month at all? Because almost all independently published books sells almost no copies, so there would be no revenue stream. The lack of sales is not a knock at indie publishing: there are plenty of reasons to publish a book other than making money. But it makes it difficult for services to make money off of them unless their incremental costs are negligible. From an author's perspective, the monthly charge seems problematic. Why pay someone a per-month charge for a book that you wrote last year? Much simpler and cheaper in the long run to generate an e-book using Sigil or similar, and put it up on Amazon for free. I'm a lousy judge of business models but the intersection of people who would use a service called <em>git</em>-anything and people who aren't tech savvy enough to generate their own e-books or PDFs seems very small. Sigil in particular makes e-book creation trivial. Comments here suggest people are using the service and pleased with it, but it seems very expensive for a relatively small increment in convenience.
mrmondo 12y ago
This looks really lovely - I've recently been editing / providing feedback on Gene Kim's upcoming book and we've been using a combination of O' Reilys new platform 'chimera' and a GitHub private repo - but this looks to be better suited to the process.
primitivesuave 12y ago
I've been using GitBook since the early days, and it has improved significantly in a relatively short amount of time. The web-based book editor is phenomenal, and it is perfect for creating documentation and lesson plans for students. I've been pointing every teacher I meet toward organizing and sharing their written material with markdown on GitBook.
netheril96 12y ago
Does this support inlined math formulas? This feature is very important, especially for a lot of technical writers. If it is present, then advertise it on the front page.
- snx 12y ago
  I suppose that's another target audience. Check out https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/
- JohnHammersley 12y ago
  We've developed a LaTeX-based platform (https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com) exactly for this type of audience :)
- detaro 12y ago
  There are MathJAX and KaTeX plugins: http://plugins.gitbook.com/ http://plugins.gitbook.com/
- AaronO 12y ago
  Yes, it supports inlined math formulas, through Mathjax (and KaTeX). It the upcoming 2.0.0 release, we actually render mathjax formulas to SVGs & PNGs so that they are visible in PDFs/EPUBs/Mobi. Here's a very math intensive book for example: https://www.gitbook.com/book/jandeleeuw/bras/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/jandeleeuw/bras/details
  - avaku 12y ago
    FYI: Citations \cite{} don't work in this example book
Centreal 12y ago
We have a serious problem for research and development at scale is at hostage of centralized publishers. Gitchain (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758608) is the first and only proof system that can establish reliable intellectual property management and history logs. Literacy reading and writing through Github, Authorea, Penflip, Gitbook all share the same liability without clear federation.
axx 12y ago
I think they should add two things: - Add "Reader" Accounts, so people can add Books to their collection etc. - Add "Download All Formats" Link for public Books. Many People have different Devices and it might be handy to download all Formats at once.
aidanhs 12y ago
This is pretty interesting. For the book I'm co-authoring at the moment[0] I ended up putting together my own toolchain, including: 1. A dead-simple web IDE for asciidoc with live preview[1] 2. A script for checking for common AsciiDoc mistakes (e.g. an unterminated table will mess up all text following it). 3. A script which enforces the house style. 4. A makefile which runs docker (of course) to build the book with Manning styling. 5. A buildbot configuration on my server to run 2, 3 and 4 above on `git push` and move the generated pdf and docx into a directory served by nginx. Though it may seem like a lot, this investment has been totally worth it - the ability to push a change and be viewing the updated pdf in ~1 minute is very liberating. I can't imagine what it'd be like to not have this kind of thing in place. I can share some more of the above if there's interest. If you're ever thinking of writing a book yourself, I'd highly recommend making the investment into a process like the above (or a tool like GitBook, though I've never tried it and it seems to be more than just a build tool) so you can get the boring stuff out of the way and focus on what you want to be doing - writing. [0] http://docker-in-practice.github.io/ http://docker-in-practice.github.io/ [1] https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde
- koevet 12y ago
  We did the same for our book about Groovy language. Our Jenkins-based build was: - checking markdown for grammar errors - transforming the markdown into doc files, required by the publisher (Packt), with all the Word formatting applied - compile the Groovy code in the examples and verify the code with a Linter
  - stunthamsterio 12y ago
    I've written a book for Packt, and I'm in the middle of another - I'd kill for a Markdown converter for their Word format. Any chance you've open sourced it?
    - koevet 12y ago
      drop me an email - contact details in my profile
bambax 12y ago
> Books on GitBook are written using a beautiful editor and publish using Git or GitHub. => publishED?
avaku 12y ago
20% royalty is really large
- rdsnsca 12y ago
  Then tell us the name of a publisher that takes less. Bet there isn't one, the next would be a tie between Apple and Amazon at 30 %.
  - danellis 12y ago
    softcover.io pays 90%.
  - sufflo2 12y ago
    If they publish to those places, then I think this is 20% on top of the publisher's 30% though? So that's 50% of your revenue. Please correct me if I'm missing something.
  - ze_dude 12y ago
    Leanpub.com lets you keep roughly 90% and the publishing process is quite painless
- mandlar 12y ago
  Couldn't you technically take the output of GitBook and publish to each service (Amazon, Google Books, iTunes, etc) yourself? It seems you are only paying for the convenience of them doing it for you.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
kriro 12y ago
This is indeed interesting and something I thought about recently on the train. I dabble in fiction writing and was thinking about trying a kickstarter of sorts at the end of the year. One of the key things I wanted to offer was making the writing process as transparent as possible. My initial thought didn't go much beyound..."well github repo would be a start". This seems like just the thing I could use. Bookmarked and added to my Trello card for the project :)
AaronO 12y ago
Hi I'm Aaron, one of the GitBook co-founders checking in. You are giving great feedback and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you have. BTW, in case some of you missed it, we're a big believer in open-source, in fact our book format and toolchain is open: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook This allows us to build better publishing tools together, no vendor lock-in and developers can build plugins to extend GitBook's features, here's a few: http://plugins.gitbook.com/ http://plugins.gitbook.com/.
tempodox 12y ago
Nice idea, but I'm getting so sick of seeing just-another-signup-form again and again and again... Instead of offering the next useless service I would be better off performing myself, someone really should fix sign-ups (i.e. making them obsolete). That would really be progress for a change. As for authoring, you could also use a decent SCM instead of git for versioning your texts. After all, the workflow model of git is hand-optimized for open-source software development which has nothing to do with book authoring. You would be better off with a centralized repository in typical cases. But git is all the rage now, no matter whether it's actually the right tool. Maybe someone ought to remind the kids that SCM is larger than git, regardless of what fashion dictates.
jklinger410 12y ago
>A modern, publishing toolchain, simply taking you from ideas to finished, polished books. This commas here don't work in my opinion. Bad start for a book site. "A modern publishing toolchain. Simply taking you from ideas to finished, polished books." "A modern publishing toolchain that simply takes you from ideas, to finished, polished books." "A modern publishing toolchain simply taking you from ideas, to finished, polished books." Any of those would be better.
- danellis 12y ago
  Also, the example they chose for their front page is full of errors: "Setup the development environment" and "How boot works?" as headings.
picks_at_nits 12y ago
> You guys are giving great feedback My feedback is, "Avoid making needless assumptions about gender.” :-) p.s. Thank you!
- AaronO 12y ago
  Fixed ! Thanks I did mean "guys" in a gender-neutral sense, but you're right it's just as good without.
  - bovermyer 12y ago
    I wouldn't worry about it too much; look at his user name. This service is something I could have used about two years ago, when I was still actively an author. Maybe my curiosity about the toolchain (and my love of Markdown) will pull me back in.
    - picks_at_nits 12y ago
      A “nit” is a louse egg. On its own, it is nearly invisible and unlikely to trouble you. But left alone, it hatches into a louse. You can probably survive a louse or two quite easily. But if a couple of people in a community each have a louse or two, they breed. And eventually, your community is full of lice, and then it is very difficult to get rid of them. Monkeys groom each other regularly, picking at the nits, thus keeping them below the level where they can bloom into a full-on louse infestation. The metaphor applies to coding style, edge cases, questionable security practices, untested code, and grammar.
  - picks_at_nits 12y ago
    Thank you. And may I say, gitbook is awesome. Imagine teleporting back to the 1980s and showing this to an author trying to write the next Windows 3.1 Missing Manual. They would swoon.
- vog 12y ago
  Not sure why this was downvoted. Pointing out the danger of dismissing half of the population (and thus potential customers) is a perfectly valid concern.
emehrkay 12y ago
You ever have an idea, play it out in your head, plan it a little, build a little towards it, and just not get anywhere with it and then someone release gitbook.com? Great stuff, after Apple released ibooks author a few years ago the gears started to turn in my head about a simplified publishing platform. I guess I didn't move faster/further with the idea because it eventually just felt like a blog or website authoring tool. Was the editor pictured on this site available to download a few months back? I feel like I played with it, or something similar.
- AaronO 12y ago
  Hi, Aaron from GitBook here. Thanks for the kind words! Yep, you might have seen the editor: https://www.gitbook.com/editor https://www.gitbook.com/editor (the older version is on GitHub: https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor) I think the publishing/documentation/writing industries have yet to see the benefits of automation and better tooling. Writing should be simple and accessible. What we're trying to do is automate all the painful/boring parts so that writers can focus on what they do best: writing. I'm not surprised you had the same idea :) If you want to share your thoughts or talk, you can email me at: aaron AT gitbook DOT com And if you want to contribute to GitBook, our book format and toolchain is open source: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook
geerlingguy 12y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been much mention of LeanPub here; in addition to GitBook, it has what I would consider a decent modern publishing toolchain that gets out of the way for most types of writing. I've been writing/publishing Ansible for DevOps over the past year now, and LeanPub is the ideal platform for me to both write/author the book (though I just edit Markdown in Sublime and sync through Dropbox—you can use GitHub if you'd like as well) and to publish and sell the book. I've used GitBook a little bit, but not enough to give a really good comparison to LeanPub. But both are so much better than the old 'build your own bespoke system' or Microsoft Word-based workflow!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
taivare 12y ago
I have a short book < under 50 pages , files are currently OpenOffice,full-justified ,doc files.. is it possible to import these into gitbook ?
treve 12y ago
This makes me want to write a book!
alphaBetaGamma 12y ago
Would this be a good fit for a book with lots of pictures, where the design, placement of pictures, and flow of text around them is important? I just started writing a short book like that with Scribus.

172 points by lobo_tuerto 12y ago

I really like the the simplicity of the plugin system. Adding (Ka)TeX support, for example, was just a matter of few clicks. Creating plugins looks straight-forward too; you can extend the site or filter / decorate text. This makes me want to use GitBook. If they don't support an idea I know I'd be able to write a plugin for it. And with time and their steady growth I probably wouldn't even have to. Sure, it's very new and has bugs, but I think this has a lot of potential.

atmosx 12y ago

Anyone tried to write a non-english book using gitbook?

bpesquet 12y ago
Yes, and it works fine (example : https://www.gitbook.com/book/bpesquet/programmation-orientee-objet-csharp/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/bpesquet/programmation-orientee...). You can even write multi-languages books.
AaronO 12y ago
GitBook co-founder here. We have a lot of non-english books actually: https://www.gitbook.com/explore https://www.gitbook.com/explore, over a thousand in chinese alone. In the upcoming 2.0.0 release, we've further improved internationalisation: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/tree/master/theme/i18n https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/tree/master/theme/i18n We automatically detect your book's language (or you can specify itself) and so then the build chain can automatically use translations for menu entries etc ... if available in your language.
- atmosx 12y ago
  My mother-tongue is Greek. I can imagine it's not your top priority. I will test the waters hopefully somewhere before summer :-) Thanks for the reply.
- progman 12y ago
  Will Hebrew also be supported? With vowel points? I could simulate such letters with icons but I wonder if they look acceptable on different devices (iOS, kindle etc.)

bkanber 12y ago

Really interesting idea. I think this has the potential to grow into a real publishing platform, but also think that their name might hurt them. "GitBook" is very techie, and the name and the git-geared UX might be a hurdle towards moving past early adopters.

ejp 12y ago
My thoughts exactly. The larger target market here is authors in general, with tech-savvy git users who also happen to write books as a much smaller subset. It might behoove you to hide git in the background, as I suspect they do here: https://draftin.com/about https://draftin.com/about
lobo_tuerto 12y ago
I think it doesn't really hurt, on the contrary, because of the name it might attract the _techie people_ and become the de facto publishing platform for all sorts of technical books.
grey-area 12y ago
Very few non-developers are going to use git unfortunately, so I doubt they are limiting their market.
- detaro 12y ago
  Pure git directly, no. But a nice GUI system with git (or another VCS) under the hood could work quite well. People in the publishing industry at least already understand the concepts of versioning, diffs and merges, it's just that existing tools are optimized for code, not text.
  - tragic 12y ago
    That's part of it, yes. But code at the end of the day is just text, and at least the github interface is able to do word-by-word diffs. That ought, in the end, to be enough. The other issue is that non-technical people, in my experience, prefer to do their writing using software that does not bounce out VCS-friendly files, eg Word. Also, the terminology of git is somewhat abstruse to the novice. It's a shame, because I can anecdotally think of one or two occasions where decent version control would have really, really, really helped in managing publications.

captn3m0 12y ago

I'm using gitbook to write a book currently (so I'm biased), but its an excellent platform for writers (especially those familiar with git). My best bits: - Most of the product is open-source, which means I can tinker with their publishing platform. - Version control - Markdown support - Mailing lists for readers (so you can send email updates) - Support for donations and selling (I'm not using it, though) - A traffic email sent every week - Builds are pretty fast - They even offer an educational discount on the pro plans if you ask nicely. A few issues I've faced: - The traffic stats are not realistic. It counts page loads, which are down by a factor of 2-3 as per my google analytics. Also, the country demographics are very clearly wrong (unless there is a readership of my book in Philippines that I don't know of) - Landing page customization. They do have a few options, but I'd like more options If there is someone who has tried both softcover.io (by Michael Hartl) and gitbook, I'd like to hear their thoughts.

srinivasupadhya 12y ago

GoCD moved its user & developer docs to GitBook. user docs: http://www.go.cd/documentation/user/current/ http://www.go.cd/documentation/user/current/ dev docs: http://www.go.cd/documentation/developer/ http://www.go.cd/documentation/developer/ and its been great so far! The best feature by far is fast & accurate search.

transfire 12y ago

Pricing model doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Just charge royalties for books sold. Why charge per month at all? If worried about many people starting books and never publishing then a small annual free should be enough to weed those out.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
> Just charge royalties for books sold. Why charge per month at all? Because almost all independently published books sells almost no copies, so there would be no revenue stream. The lack of sales is not a knock at indie publishing: there are plenty of reasons to publish a book other than making money. But it makes it difficult for services to make money off of them unless their incremental costs are negligible. From an author's perspective, the monthly charge seems problematic. Why pay someone a per-month charge for a book that you wrote last year? Much simpler and cheaper in the long run to generate an e-book using Sigil or similar, and put it up on Amazon for free. I'm a lousy judge of business models but the intersection of people who would use a service called <em>git</em>-anything and people who aren't tech savvy enough to generate their own e-books or PDFs seems very small. Sigil in particular makes e-book creation trivial. Comments here suggest people are using the service and pleased with it, but it seems very expensive for a relatively small increment in convenience.

mrmondo 12y ago

This looks really lovely - I've recently been editing / providing feedback on Gene Kim's upcoming book and we've been using a combination of O' Reilys new platform 'chimera' and a GitHub private repo - but this looks to be better suited to the process.

primitivesuave 12y ago

I've been using GitBook since the early days, and it has improved significantly in a relatively short amount of time. The web-based book editor is phenomenal, and it is perfect for creating documentation and lesson plans for students. I've been pointing every teacher I meet toward organizing and sharing their written material with markdown on GitBook.

netheril96 12y ago

Does this support inlined math formulas? This feature is very important, especially for a lot of technical writers. If it is present, then advertise it on the front page.

snx 12y ago
I suppose that's another target audience. Check out https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/
JohnHammersley 12y ago
We've developed a LaTeX-based platform (https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com) exactly for this type of audience :)
detaro 12y ago
There are MathJAX and KaTeX plugins: http://plugins.gitbook.com/ http://plugins.gitbook.com/
AaronO 12y ago
Yes, it supports inlined math formulas, through Mathjax (and KaTeX). It the upcoming 2.0.0 release, we actually render mathjax formulas to SVGs & PNGs so that they are visible in PDFs/EPUBs/Mobi. Here's a very math intensive book for example: https://www.gitbook.com/book/jandeleeuw/bras/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/jandeleeuw/bras/details
- avaku 12y ago
  FYI: Citations \cite{} don't work in this example book

Centreal 12y ago

We have a serious problem for research and development at scale is at hostage of centralized publishers. Gitchain (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758608) is the first and only proof system that can establish reliable intellectual property management and history logs. Literacy reading and writing through Github, Authorea, Penflip, Gitbook all share the same liability without clear federation.

axx 12y ago

I think they should add two things: - Add "Reader" Accounts, so people can add Books to their collection etc. - Add "Download All Formats" Link for public Books. Many People have different Devices and it might be handy to download all Formats at once.

aidanhs 12y ago

This is pretty interesting. For the book I'm co-authoring at the moment[0] I ended up putting together my own toolchain, including: 1. A dead-simple web IDE for asciidoc with live preview[1] 2. A script for checking for common AsciiDoc mistakes (e.g. an unterminated table will mess up all text following it). 3. A script which enforces the house style. 4. A makefile which runs docker (of course) to build the book with Manning styling. 5. A buildbot configuration on my server to run 2, 3 and 4 above on `git push` and move the generated pdf and docx into a directory served by nginx. Though it may seem like a lot, this investment has been totally worth it - the ability to push a change and be viewing the updated pdf in ~1 minute is very liberating. I can't imagine what it'd be like to not have this kind of thing in place. I can share some more of the above if there's interest. If you're ever thinking of writing a book yourself, I'd highly recommend making the investment into a process like the above (or a tool like GitBook, though I've never tried it and it seems to be more than just a build tool) so you can get the boring stuff out of the way and focus on what you want to be doing - writing. [0] http://docker-in-practice.github.io/ http://docker-in-practice.github.io/ [1] https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde

koevet 12y ago
We did the same for our book about Groovy language. Our Jenkins-based build was: - checking markdown for grammar errors - transforming the markdown into doc files, required by the publisher (Packt), with all the Word formatting applied - compile the Groovy code in the examples and verify the code with a Linter
- stunthamsterio 12y ago
  I've written a book for Packt, and I'm in the middle of another - I'd kill for a Markdown converter for their Word format. Any chance you've open sourced it?
  - koevet 12y ago
    drop me an email - contact details in my profile

bambax 12y ago

> Books on GitBook are written using a beautiful editor and publish using Git or GitHub. => publishED?

avaku 12y ago

20% royalty is really large

rdsnsca 12y ago
Then tell us the name of a publisher that takes less. Bet there isn't one, the next would be a tie between Apple and Amazon at 30 %.
- danellis 12y ago
  softcover.io pays 90%.
- sufflo2 12y ago
  If they publish to those places, then I think this is 20% on top of the publisher's 30% though? So that's 50% of your revenue. Please correct me if I'm missing something.
- ze_dude 12y ago
  Leanpub.com lets you keep roughly 90% and the publishing process is quite painless
mandlar 12y ago
Couldn't you technically take the output of GitBook and publish to each service (Amazon, Google Books, iTunes, etc) yourself? It seems you are only paying for the convenience of them doing it for you.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

kriro 12y ago

This is indeed interesting and something I thought about recently on the train. I dabble in fiction writing and was thinking about trying a kickstarter of sorts at the end of the year. One of the key things I wanted to offer was making the writing process as transparent as possible. My initial thought didn't go much beyound..."well github repo would be a start". This seems like just the thing I could use. Bookmarked and added to my Trello card for the project :)

AaronO 12y ago

Hi I'm Aaron, one of the GitBook co-founders checking in. You are giving great feedback and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you have. BTW, in case some of you missed it, we're a big believer in open-source, in fact our book format and toolchain is open: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook This allows us to build better publishing tools together, no vendor lock-in and developers can build plugins to extend GitBook's features, here's a few: http://plugins.gitbook.com/ http://plugins.gitbook.com/.

tempodox 12y ago

Nice idea, but I'm getting so sick of seeing just-another-signup-form again and again and again... Instead of offering the next useless service I would be better off performing myself, someone really should fix sign-ups (i.e. making them obsolete). That would really be progress for a change. As for authoring, you could also use a decent SCM instead of git for versioning your texts. After all, the workflow model of git is hand-optimized for open-source software development which has nothing to do with book authoring. You would be better off with a centralized repository in typical cases. But git is all the rage now, no matter whether it's actually the right tool. Maybe someone ought to remind the kids that SCM is larger than git, regardless of what fashion dictates.

jklinger410 12y ago

>A modern, publishing toolchain, simply taking you from ideas to finished, polished books. This commas here don't work in my opinion. Bad start for a book site. "A modern publishing toolchain. Simply taking you from ideas to finished, polished books." "A modern publishing toolchain that simply takes you from ideas, to finished, polished books." "A modern publishing toolchain simply taking you from ideas, to finished, polished books." Any of those would be better.

danellis 12y ago
Also, the example they chose for their front page is full of errors: "Setup the development environment" and "How boot works?" as headings.

picks_at_nits 12y ago

> You guys are giving great feedback My feedback is, "Avoid making needless assumptions about gender.” :-) p.s. Thank you!

AaronO 12y ago
Fixed ! Thanks I did mean "guys" in a gender-neutral sense, but you're right it's just as good without.
- bovermyer 12y ago
  I wouldn't worry about it too much; look at his user name. This service is something I could have used about two years ago, when I was still actively an author. Maybe my curiosity about the toolchain (and my love of Markdown) will pull me back in.
  - picks_at_nits 12y ago
    A “nit” is a louse egg. On its own, it is nearly invisible and unlikely to trouble you. But left alone, it hatches into a louse. You can probably survive a louse or two quite easily. But if a couple of people in a community each have a louse or two, they breed. And eventually, your community is full of lice, and then it is very difficult to get rid of them. Monkeys groom each other regularly, picking at the nits, thus keeping them below the level where they can bloom into a full-on louse infestation. The metaphor applies to coding style, edge cases, questionable security practices, untested code, and grammar.
- picks_at_nits 12y ago
  Thank you. And may I say, gitbook is awesome. Imagine teleporting back to the 1980s and showing this to an author trying to write the next Windows 3.1 Missing Manual. They would swoon.
vog 12y ago
Not sure why this was downvoted. Pointing out the danger of dismissing half of the population (and thus potential customers) is a perfectly valid concern.

emehrkay 12y ago

You ever have an idea, play it out in your head, plan it a little, build a little towards it, and just not get anywhere with it and then someone release gitbook.com? Great stuff, after Apple released ibooks author a few years ago the gears started to turn in my head about a simplified publishing platform. I guess I didn't move faster/further with the idea because it eventually just felt like a blog or website authoring tool. Was the editor pictured on this site available to download a few months back? I feel like I played with it, or something similar.

AaronO 12y ago
Hi, Aaron from GitBook here. Thanks for the kind words! Yep, you might have seen the editor: https://www.gitbook.com/editor https://www.gitbook.com/editor (the older version is on GitHub: https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor) I think the publishing/documentation/writing industries have yet to see the benefits of automation and better tooling. Writing should be simple and accessible. What we're trying to do is automate all the painful/boring parts so that writers can focus on what they do best: writing. I'm not surprised you had the same idea :) If you want to share your thoughts or talk, you can email me at: aaron AT gitbook DOT com And if you want to contribute to GitBook, our book format and toolchain is open source: https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook

geerlingguy 12y ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been much mention of LeanPub here; in addition to GitBook, it has what I would consider a decent modern publishing toolchain that gets out of the way for most types of writing. I've been writing/publishing Ansible for DevOps over the past year now, and LeanPub is the ideal platform for me to both write/author the book (though I just edit Markdown in Sublime and sync through Dropbox—you can use GitHub if you'd like as well) and to publish and sell the book. I've used GitBook a little bit, but not enough to give a really good comparison to LeanPub. But both are so much better than the old 'build your own bespoke system' or Microsoft Word-based workflow!

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taivare 12y ago

I have a short book < under 50 pages , files are currently OpenOffice,full-justified ,doc files.. is it possible to import these into gitbook ?

treve 12y ago

This makes me want to write a book!

alphaBetaGamma 12y ago

Would this be a good fit for a book with lots of pictures, where the design, placement of pictures, and flow of text around them is important? I just started writing a short book like that with Scribus.