Booktype: An Open Source, Cross-Platform Approach To E-Book Publishing

Despite Apple's protestation that the iBooks Author EULA was misinterpreted, the idea of a book publishing system that could be used to grab copyright of the prepared text is annoying — like the sort of EULAs that seem to give photo-sharing sites unlimited re-use rights of hosted personal photos. New submitter rohangarg points out a publishing system which shouldn't have such problems, and is nicely cross-platform besides: "A new open-source digital writing and publishing platform has been launched by non-profit group Sourcefabric. Booktype allows for collaborative editing and writing of books that can be easily outputted to on-demand print services and eReaders such as the Amazon Kindle, Nook, iPad, and more with a few simple clicks. Booktype source can be found here." The online demo also leads to some downloadable examples (as PDFs).

Comments

Re:Standard Reader Format

[jank1887]

if only there was some kind of electronic publication standard format that everyone could use. Or some kind of conversion software to get books into this format.

sure, some companies will try to fracture the market, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Re:LaTeX?

[WillAdams]

The biggest difficulties in using LaTeX in publishing:

  - not WYSIWYG (and TeXmacs never got any traction and unfortunately, LyX is different enough that it requires its own acronym --- WYSIWYM)
  - requires up-front investment in creating macros for styles &c., discipline to use them as opposed to the ad hoc finger-painting which all-too-many Word and InDesign documents devolve into
  - document classes must be programmed, not designed
  - not a normal part of the design curriculum, so hiring is hard (I was the only candidate at my first job out of college who had experience in TeX)
  - export to .html has a lot of options (hevea, tth, latex2html), none of which have achieved prevalence and all of which work differently

If typography were easy, Microsoft Word wouldn't be the foetid mess it's evolved into.

Someone needs to package up one of the latex html export options so as to work w/ Sigil or one of the other ePub editors / validators.

Re:LaTeX?

[fyngyrz]

E-Book publishing must deal with non-constant "page" sizes. Even on individual devices - when a tablet reader rotates 90 degrees, the book contents must reflow to deal with the new "page" width. Furthermore, users now expect to be able to change fonts and font sizes at will while reading. Rendering needs to be done in the reader software, not during file preparation.

Tailor-made for HTML. You can specify paragraphs, sections, underline, bold, italic, embed images, hyperlinks... all with reflow and user-specified fonts and sizes and colors.

RANT: That was the original intent of HTML: That the user had control over the look and feel, and the author provided content. It's only been in the last few years that websites started screwing up the whole idea of content following browser resizing -- one of the worst design mistakes made, IMHO, because it wastes the user's expensive desktop space in favor of the designer's "idea." If you're any good, you'll design so you get "that look" at a particular size, then the user can find that and stay there if they want to, rather than being stuck with a hard-coded 1024x window or something like that. You can do some pretty clever things along this line with CSS, but hardly anyone does.

It's gotten to the point where if your content reflows the way it should, a lot of people think you're doing it "wrong." Amazing, really. /RANT