Ask HN: Book Authoring Tools for Hackers?

7 points·jaxn··6 comments

I am going to write a book. It will be like an extended vision statement that I plan to give to my customers. I would like to make it relatively easy to update and republish, hopefully using on-demand printing and fulfillment.

Are there any tools that are really awesome for this?

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My company (Onyx Neon) has a pretty good lightweight workflow for producing books in multiple formats. I've been working to extract those tools into a free software project, as much of it uses free software already:

https://github.com/chromatic/Pod-PseudoPod-Book

We've been very happy with Lightning Source for on-demand printing and fulfillment.

I was planning to use Ingram for publishing b/c I am in Nashville and they are a local company. Checked out Lightening Source and realized that is Ingram's on-demand publishing product. I guess that pretty much seals it.

If you're using on-demand printing, you probably will need to typeset it yourself. Use LaTeX (or even better XeTeX).

May I ask how you started out with the book? How did you come up with the structure and content.

It seems to me that it is relatively easy to hammer out just a book to have a book. For a memoir or something like that this might be fine. But writing good quality practice/problem centric ones with cases, illustrations, and a decent layouting appear to me like demanding an incredible amount of work. Would be very interested in any thoughts on how to optimize this process.

There's LiberWriter made by HNer davidw - http://www.liberwriter.com.

Check out lulu.com, sounds like others use them in a similar fashion.

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