Booktype: An Open Source, Cross-Platform Approach To E-Book Publishing 87
Posted
by
timothy
from the no-presses-to-stop dept.
from the no-presses-to-stop dept.
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).
Re:LaTeX? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that Latex is made/designed for creating fixed size paper output. It is really not good when you need to output content which can be reflowed depending on the size of the users output device.
Re:Standard Reader Format (Score:5, Informative)
if only there was some kind of electronic publication standard format [wikipedia.org] that everyone could use. Or some kind of conversion software [wikipedia.org] to get books into this format.
sure, some companies will try to fracture the market, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
It's called ePub (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LaTeX? (Score:5, Informative)
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) .html has a lot of options (hevea, tth, latex2html), none of which have achieved prevalence and all of which work differently
- 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
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.
The Github link (Score:3, Informative)
for Booktype is here: https://github.com/sourcefabric/Booktype [github.com]