Writebook

You know, it's really easy to post short form content on multiple social platforms, and individual blog posts on many other platforms. These problems have all been solved. But publishing books online in a beautiful, coherent, compact, easy-to-navigate HTML format is surprisingly challenging. 20 essays can be one book. A company's manual can be a book. Even an actual book like Shape Up can be a book. But usually you need to create a customized website, or reluctantly use blog publishing/CMS tools to barely integrate scattered articles into a whole. This is not ideal. We know-we have published various books online, and we have to go through the customization route every time. This is a warning to having to take a customized route for things that should be very simple. It is also an opportunity. It really shouldn't be so difficult. So we made some changes to this. Launching Writebook. This is a dead simple platform for publishing online books. They have a cover, can have a title page, can have a picture page, or can have a text page. Each book has its own URL, and navigation and progress tracking are built-in. Writebook is not a service, but a piece of software that you can download and install on your own server. We made it extremely simple and it only takes a few minutes to get started. Even technical novices can easily set up. We send a command via email, you paste it into the terminal, and it takes care of everything else. No maintenance is required, it can manage itself, automatically update, etc. Writebook also comes with all Rails code, so you can see how it is built, modify it to your needs, and learn how such applications are made. How much does it cost? Completely free. Writebook is free. Writebook is our love letter to truly independent, zero-cost open web publishing. There are no gatekeepers, no publishers are needed. Only you and your words face the world.