What is BookType ?
Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.
With Booktype you can create books. Real, good-looking paper books you can hold in your hands. You can also use. Booktype’s powerful, quick output to PDF, EPUB, OpenDocument text and HTML to export books ready for Amazon, iBooks, or your preferred publishing outlet. Booktype is designed to help you produce books with others, or by yourself. Booktype is also a social environment where you can discuss your views about producing books, seek assistance from others, or look for projects to contribute to. Booktype is web-based software which means you do not install it on your computer; rather, you access it through a web browser. It is Free Software (licensed under the GNU Affero GPL), meaning that it can be freely downloaded, re-used and customised. You can install your own copy of Booktype on a server, or alternatively you can set up a cloud-hosted Booktype Pro account and let Sourcefabric, the non-profit organisation which produces Booktype, take care of installation, hosting and security.
The open source platform to help you write and publish print and digital books
Booktype makes it easier for people and organisations to collate, organise, edit and publish books. Delivering frictionlessly to print, third party services via an API and almost any ereader, Booktype facilitates collaborative production processes. No more lost manuscripts, overwritten Word files, awkward wikis or cumbersome CMSes.
Some typical uses of the platform might be :
- Writing books – a work of fiction, manuals, cookbooks etc.
- Producing printed books
- Producing ebooks
- Writing any content as an individual
- Collaboratively authoring content
- Rapidly developing content in ‘book sprints’
- Customising existing content to apply to a very specific context
- Translating a book into another language
While you can use Booktype to support traditional book authoring processes, Booktype also supports the rapid development of content in ‘book sprints’. A book sprint is an intensive collaborative event where typically six to ten people can focus on writing a book in three to five days. These collaborators might be in the same room or located around the Internet; in either case, they work together simultaneously to produce a book.
The Dashboard
Your Dashboard helps you to manage your books and groups, edit a number of settings to customise your profile on the Booktype server, and communicate with other Booktype users. In the Dashboard tab, there is a link Follow my changes below your user name, full name and profile picture, which points to an RSS feed of any writing or editing work that you do on the Booktype server. This feed URL can be used by external programs to enable other people to follow your work.
If you look at another Booktype user’s Dashboard, you will see an additional Follow me button just above the RSS feed link. Clicking this button adds the other person to the Following: list beneath the DESCRIPTION field on your Dashboard. This action means that you will receive notifications each time a person that you are following sends a public message. Any Booktype users that are following your messages will be listed as Followers: beneath this. On the right side of the Dashboard tab is a messaging window. You can send a short message by entering text into the field and clicking the Share button. This message will then be shared with your followers on the Booktype server, and displayed in the Timeline box underneath. Optionally, you can click the Attach file link to open a file browse box and attach a file to the message, or click the Attach snippet link to send formatted text and a context link with the message.
href="http://booktype.org" data-color-override="false" data-hover-color-override="false" data-hover-text-color-override="#fff">Button Text href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/" data-color-override="false" data-hover-color-override="false" data-hover-text-color-override="#fff">Button Text href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/booktypepro" data-color-override="false" data-hover-color-override="false" data-hover-text-color-override="#fff">Button Text href="http://booktype-demo.sourcefabric.org" data-color-override="false" data-hover-color-override="false" data-hover-text-color-override="#fff">Button Text href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/manuals/" data-color-override="false" data-hover-color-override="false" data-hover-text-color-override="#fff">Button Text
[…] What is BookType ? Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use … […]
http://booktype-demo.sourcefabric.org