Ask HN: Book Authoring Tools for Hackers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3049769

by jaxn • 15 years ago

7 6 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

chromatic• 15 years ago

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.

jaxn• 15 years ago

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.

kragniz• 15 years ago

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

stfu• 15 years ago

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.

mjs00• 15 years ago

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

revorad• 15 years ago

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

Ask HN: Book Authoring Tools for Hackers?

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