Web-Based Book-Writing Software
Posted January 1st, 2007 @ 10:57pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm going to be writing a book this year with a friend. We'd like to write and maintain the book online (because we're likely to publish it that way), and we're looking for software to do it. We thought of using WordPress or another blogging tool, but we want to organize things by chapter, subchapter, etc. - not by date or category. We thought of writing our own tool, but even a basic one would take a day and that's a day I could spend doing something else. A wiki is probably overkill (plus we don't care for wikis) and LaTeX, though great for (some kinds of) books, simply isn't a good fit.
So, is there such a tool out there? We're not that worried about saving a record of changes (nightly database dumps can be automated, among other things) - just a simple-to-use tool that works really well for writing a book.
It shouldn't matter with a web-based tool, but I'm on a Mac and he's on a PC. The book will have a significant number of images, so we need something that supports simple image markup (HTML's img tag qualifies).
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Posted 01 Jan 2007 at 11:16pm #
Drupal is quite a nice lightweight CMS, with a module designed for writing and maintaining a book. I'm not an author, and I wouldn't know how good it will be, but I know it's great for some of the low budget CMS rollouts I've done for clients lately.
Posted 01 Jan 2007 at 11:18pm #
How about Google Docs? http://docs.google.com. The downside is, it doesn't work with Safari.
Posted 01 Jan 2007 at 11:44pm #
Andrew said on January 1, 2007:
Got a link? Googling for "using drupal to write a book" doesn't lead to much (except books about using drupal).
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 12:29am #
I did a quick search on the Drupal website and came up with this: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/book.
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 1:02am #
I would agree with Google Docs. My friends and I are working on a book project and we went from using a Wiki (Writeboard) to Google Docs. There is even an RSS feed for recent changes and it is very easy to add collaborators. You can export to Doc, Open Office, and PDF.
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 1:14am #
brendoman said on January 2, 2007:
I use Safari, and I'd probably like something I can install on my own domain. I don't trust my data to sources outside of my control.
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 3:05pm #
There is a fellow working on a mod to let WordPress function in this manner. Take a look through the WP Hackers mailing list archives.
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 5:18pm #
I'll vouche for drupal's book authoring module. Nothing fancy, but it works quite well for a small team of authors. If that's you're only need then you'll want to disable all the other CMS features. V4.7 is the only one I've tried the book module in.
Posted 02 Jan 2007 at 8:00pm #
Book on 5.0 is the same, and quite nice for such things.
Posted 03 Jan 2007 at 1:14am #
Hi Erik,
You may also want to check out Hieraki at http://rubyforge.org/projects/hieraki/ . It's built using Ruby on Rails and is pretty approachable. It's also open source, so you can always dive in a tweak it to meet your needs.
Happy New Year!
Posted 04 Jan 2007 at 10:17pm #
37signals's "Writeboard" might help.
Posted 05 Jan 2007 at 5:45pm #
I wouldn't trust Google Docs, either. Good move. Google has had a recent history of canceling programs on one day's notice-- its API programs and Google Answers, for example. I wouldn't trust anything important with Google, because they may just end it one day and you're out your hard work.