Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books [LWN.net]

From:		Adam Thomas <adam.thomas-AT-sourcefabric.org>
To:		pr-AT-lwn.net, lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books
Date:		Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:33:53 +0100
Message-ID:		<0B436398-16FA-4B9A-B447-49731038BA61@sourcefabric.org>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

Dear lwn,

Booktype is Sourcefabric's free, open source platform for writing and publishing print and digital
books. It's built for collaborative writing, is open source and free, can push to all channels
including print and it allows anyone to build an entire platform and community around writing,
editing and publishing.

We're hoping it's really going to open up publishing for independent publishers but also for
organisations that don't traditionally see themselves as publishers.

Full press release is below.

Screenshots: http://www.sourcefabric.org/attachment/49/Booktype%20Scre...
Press Pack: http://www.sourcefabric.org/attachment/50/BooktypeTwoPage...
Video: http://youtu.be/1mLCDKmmEyg
Website: http://booktype.org

As ever, please get in touch if you need any more information. All my contacts are below, feel free
to call or skype.

Best wishes, Adam

---

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books

NEW YORK—February 14, 2012—Sourcefabric today announced Booktype, a free, open source platform
that produces books for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Individuals
and organisations can create books solo or collaboratively with others via the web. The
announcement was made at at O'Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.

"With Booktype, book production becomes open, collaborative and something anyone can do,” said
Booktype Project Lead Adam Hyde. “You can work with people distributed all over the world to
access the skills and knowledge needed to create the books you want. Booktype changes everything."

Booktype features:

• clean, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface
• simultaneous editing, live chat and messaging tools
• powerful, quick output to pdf, epub, mobi, odt and html
• export books ready for Amazon, iBooks, Lulu.com and other print-on-demand or ebook stores
• collaborative tools to engage proofreaders, editors and contributors
• merged print and digital workflow to keep books up-to-date across all platforms
• individual book history, versions, clones, editing permissions and license management
• easy import of content, chapters and entire books from other sources for remix and reuse

Booktype can be used as an out-of-the-box community platform to enable contributors to create
profiles, join groups, watch books, chat live, post status messages and keep track of book
activity. Communities such as www.booki.cc and FLOSS Manuals are already using the platform with
thousands of contributors in multiple languages collaborating on everything from cookbooks to
textbooks, reference guides to works of fiction.

“Booktype is an exciting new innovative platform that is bringing book production online and is
an important new form of free culture and free knowledge production,” said Mike Linksvayer, Vice
President at Creative Commons and long-term supporter of the project.

Booktype uses WebKit, the open source project that powers Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s
iBooks app. This ensures great looking content across all mobile, tablet and ereader platforms,
plus makes designing books easy for anyone with knowledge of web design. Sourcefabric are currently
working on adding interactive ebook design and advanced typographic control to Booktype’s
toolset.

http://booktype.org/ (live on 14th Feb 2012)

About Sourcefabric
http://www.sourcefabric.org

Sourcefabric is a Czech non-profit organisation that builds open source tools for journalists,
newsrooms and radio stations. It has its headquarters in Prague, branches in Berlin and Toronto,
and representatives in Minsk, Guatemala, Warsaw, Belgrade and Cluj. It started life as CAMP in
1998, the new-media arm of the Media Development Loan Fund. In 2010 Sourcefabric launched as a
wholly autonomous organisation securing private funding that propelled it into the ranks of one of
the largest European open source projects for news and media.

###

END

###

Adam Thomas
Communications Manager, Sourcefabric
adam.thomas@sourcefabric.org

www.sourcefabric.com | www.sourcefabric.org

Prinzessinnenstrasse 20,
10969 Berlin, Germany
+49 (0)151 46430354
twitter: @SourceAdam | skype: adam.thomas.skype

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Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books

Posted Feb 24, 2012 0:30 UTC (Fri) by douglasbagnall (subscriber, #62736) [Link]

> Oh... so this won't inhale source material from Mediawikiae, because they reinvented that wheel.

They did somewhat, but not as suddenly as they want you to think.

"Booktype" was formerly known as "Booki", developed over the last few years by FLOSS Manuals to replace their creaking TWiki-based system. I would think they secured funding and/or hardware by relaunching with the new name and under Sourcefabric auspices. European non-profit politics are weird. Slightly more galling is that they changed the license text from GPL2+ to AGPL3 without asking contributors.

Booki used to be able to (and perhaps still can) import http://en.wikibooks.org books, but I don't think this feature has ever been used in seriousness. The main point was to impress some foundation, but it also proved that mediawiki pages are more free-form than FLOSS Manuals books and that automatic importation is not straightforward.

Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books

Posted Feb 24, 2012 0:41 UTC (Fri) by douglasbagnall (subscriber, #62736) [Link]

Oh, I see now that Nathan Willis covers this here: http://lwn.net/Articles/482880/

Sorry for the redundancy.

Booktype, an open source platform to write and publish print and digital books

Posted Feb 28, 2012 10:18 UTC (Tue) by AdamJohnHyde (guest, #83185) [Link]

Doug....Adam here, your friend and ally from FLOSS Manuals.

Disclosure: Douglas and I worked together on Booki. I employed him to develop code on the rendering engine known as Objavi. He did an extremely good job.

So some issues I need to address. First, on the relicensing - we asked the contributors. Your code in Objavi has not been changed to AGPL and that is because we havent yet asked you for the permission. You will have noticed that I am sure - that we have not, for example, migrated the Objavi code to the Sourcefabric repository for that reason. We will ask you to change it to AGPL and I hope you say yes since we want this code to remain in the public domain. Otherwise all the code developed by Aco and Tuukka in Booktype has been sanctioned by them for AGPL3. If there is a page I have missed that you have the copyright for then please let me know.

Secondly I find it odd you state that we developed mediawiki import "to impress some foundation". Absolutely untrue. We need importers like this because environments like mediawiki are not book production environments. You will know my position on this since we talked about this alot together and I know I had some difficulty convincing you that working in this way was the right way to go. However needless to say I am disappointed that you consider I had such lame motivations for wanting this kind of functionality.

As it happens we are reworking the code for importing since it is in need by an organisation that plays the role of a public watchdog monitoring the social and political movements of oil nations. They have struggled getting their mediawiki content into book form and especially they have struggled with bi-directional text issues. They came to us wanting the mediawiki importing for this reason and were extremely excited to see it. They also see what other possibilities it opens up for them.

So there are demonstrated and very worthwhile needs for this importer. More than this we do not wish to replace other free software tools chains. So Booktype is not meant to be mediawiki but it is meant to work with it and other free softwares, hence we are looking at other import chains to work with free software content management systems in a similar manner.

We have not reinvented the wheel. If you or anyone else wishes to use any free software to make books please go for it. We want to see a flourishing free software ecology and more ways to make books. However I firmly believe that if you want to make books you need a book production environment and that is what we built - we did it, as you know, because we HAD tried other alternatives (TWiki) and found we could not get as far as we needed. We found, as I am sure others will, that blogs, wikis, and CMSs are not the right environment for making books. I would also not advocate anyone use Booktype to make blogs or use it as a wiki as it is not good for that purpose.

Also, by the way, the development of Booki has been a struggle. 5 years at the grindstone trying to pay people such as yourself (and I am grateful for all the very good work you did) to make a system we needed. Sourcefabric is not trying to make "you to think" Booktype "suddenly" appeared or ('reinvented the wheel' as you put it). It is numbered 1.5 not 1.0 to recognise this pre-history and it is not obscured in anyway. Booki was a good software but had failed on many levels and I count those as personal failures. I failed at generating a market for booki, i failed at PR, I failed at getting the resources it needed to realise its vision, i failed at being able to get more money to pay people to develop it. I approached Sourcefabric to solve these issues and I am extremely grateful that they agreed to take Booki onboard and now Booktype has a chance. It was always a good software but now it is a great software and people know about it. Thank you Sourcefarbic.

I hope all is well in Wellington, sorry to not have seen you recently. Very sorry you seem to be so critical of my motivations especially in a public forum but free speech is what it is I of course support your right to do it, just as I support your or anyone elses right to scratch an itch as we did and create more free software book production platforms :)

adam