

Ask HN: Book Authoring Tools for Hackers? - jaxn

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.<p>Are there any tools that are really awesome for this?
======
chromatic
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
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
If you're using on-demand printing, you probably will need to typeset it
yourself. Use LaTeX (or even better XeTeX).

------
stfu
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.

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

------
mjs00
Check out lulu.com, sounds like others use them in a similar fashion.

