GitBook: A modern publishing toolchain
gitbook.com
gitbook.com
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/ [1] https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde
- 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
pandoc is pretty incredible. As you can see from its page, it can produce epubs and many other things - it's likely that with pandoc and a docbook file you can build a pipeline to take you wherever you need. For your purposes, you'd probably go from EPUB to kindle with KindleGen.
[1] http://asciidoctor.org/ [2] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
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
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/.
- 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.
It might behoove you to hide git in the background, as I suspect they do here: https://draftin.com/about
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.
I don't think many people are particularly attached to Word, it is just the most common thing that does what they expect. But similarly, tools would probably need at least some WYSIWYG-features. Like a simplified Word, with more sensible back-end formats and the ability to do diffs and merges also in this mode (similar to the change-tracking features in Word). If it is professionally published, complex layouting is done in different tools like Adobe InDesign anyways, so it doesn't need to be able to do much in the way of that.
'Git' is a common insult in British English (being short for 'whore's get', i.e. an illegitimate child born to a prostitute). This may possibly reflect some private humor on Linus Torvald's part, since Git is putatively the 'son of a Bit[ch]keeper'. The term is used to indicate someone foolish and obnoxious. A non programmer unfamiliar with version control would hear something like 'AssholeBook'.
Here's a very math intensive book for example: https://www.gitbook.com/book/jandeleeuw/bras/details
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
The best feature by far is fast & accurate search.
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!
Was the editor pictured on this site available to download a few months back? I feel like I played with it, or something similar.
Thanks for the kind words! Yep, you might have seen the editor: https://www.gitbook.com/editor (the older version is on GitHub: 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
Bet there isn't one, the next would be a tie between Apple and Amazon at 30 %.
Please correct me if I'm missing something.
I just started writing a short book like that with Scribus.
You can even write multi-languages books.
In the upcoming 2.0.0 release, we've further improved internationalisation: 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.
Thanks for the reply.
I could simulate such letters with icons but I wonder if they look acceptable on different devices (iOS, kindle etc.)
=> publishED?
Gitchain (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.
My feedback is, "Avoid making needless assumptions about gender.”
:-)
p.s. Thank you!
I did mean "guys" in a gender-neutral sense, but you're right it's just as good without.
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.
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.
We should understand that languages change, certain idioms and usages which were a bit objectionable in the past may change in meaning and vice versa. I think you guys represent the former.
It may hurt gender-based sensibilities of some but many languages have build in defaults that use the masculine form, a well-known example is French where (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...):
In French: Vos amis sont arrivés — ils étaient en avance ("Your friends have arrived – they were early"). Here the masculine plural pronoun ils is used rather than the feminine elles, unless it is known that all the friends in question are female (in which case the noun would also change to amies and the past participle would change to arrivées).
I am always a bit surprised by the emphasis put on gender neutral language, esp. in the US, it is usually pointed that this is sexist and may lead to many of the gender imbalances. Yet other languages where this is is even more prevalent does not seem to place that much emphasis, e.g. French (http://french.stackexchange.com/questions/836/given-the-lack...). I do not speak French, my question to native speakers is: are there similar efforts in French to rid the language of sexism? According to Wikipedia L’Académie française does not quite support such movements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_...).
To put it differently, this is still dismissing quite a big share of non-native English speaking women, as you can't be sure that those subtleties are well-known in the public. (This whole sub thread demonstrates this, by the way.)
I could lecture them about how wrong they are, but I could also use phrases that are not subject to misunderstanding.
Things like this remind me of code. If I write something that is compiler-correct, but subject to misunderstanding, I could demand that people who find it confusing go read a few more books. Or I could write it to be read by my audience.
With code, we’ve nearly universally decided that we write to be understood, and that the audience for our code is more important than whether we are “compiler correct.”
JM2C, but that’s how I feel about the word “guys” being gender-neutral. It is dictionary-correct, but not audience-correct.
An important thing to understand is that language is not governed by a strict rules, such as compilers, it's based on a social contract, in fact Wittgenstein pushed this idea to its extreme by declaring that a word's meaning is its use (this idea is not without it's own problems, of course).
I think the problem here is not that the people who object to the usage can understand the correct usage (in fact such usage is prevalent among the high-school crowd, which you can readily observe if you teach) but that they see it as sexist usage, e.g. similar to objecting to use of stewardess. I would suggest the correct approach here would give them the similar cases of y'all and you lot, not as a fry lecture but as a frank discussion.
As in, "you people"?
(Grammatically correct, non-colloquial, non-regional, and gender neutral.)
vs
Hey person can you help me?
Being colloquail is a feature, not a bug.