

Ask HN: What's the best self-publishing platform for a technical ebook? - CoreSet

Looking to publish an ebook and evaluating my options now. Any ideas on a good platform to use? I prefer writing in markdown.
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RogerL
I'm using IPython Notebook. It has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are all
code is inline, and you don't have to worry about having to keep things in
sync (change the code for this plot, make sure the output gets named correctly
and copied to the right place in the book). LaTeX is supported. It is easy to
do animations with either javascript or Python. It is a very hackable
platform. nbviewer.ipython.org will serve a static version of your book (it
accesses it from Github, it does not store it on its servers).

Downside is it doesn't have the concept of 'books'. No chapters, etc. PDF
generation is clunky at best. There is currently a version 3 in development
that is changing the format of the ipynb format. It only supports Python,
Julia, and Ruby as languages right now (but it turning into the Jupyter
project with plans to support many more). You are kind of on the bleeding
edge.

Mostly I like it, but I do wish there was more support/concept of books vs
notebooks.

edit: This is not a recommendation; I did not survey all of the options. For
me the mix of executable code and text and LaTeX in one document was a killer
feature. That may be irrelevant for your book.

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CoreSet
I decided to go with Leanpub. I really like it's philosophy of making it easy
to push updates, which I consider particularly important to a technical
manual. And of course, being able to write everything in markdown and push to
a private Github repo to start a new version suits me like a glove!

