Booktype

Start writing books collaboratively with Booktype! Booktype 1.6.1 is out today with some improvements to the history function that will help you see the progress of your book cover. As well, now book owners and administrators have the ability to ... [More] delete books and chapters. Special thanks to our Booktype community, we have also included the new French localization in this upgrade! Download and install Booktype 1.6.1 on Unix or OSX Get a Booktype Pro account for cloud-hosted publishing Booktype is supported on Unix systems like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and also on an OSX server. You'll need 3GB Ram and 1Ghz processor as a minimum hardware set-up. See improvements and updates to your cover with Booktype. In the last release of Booktype, we introduced the cover manager functionality where you can upload, manage and assign covers to your books. You can also upload multiple covers for each book and assign different covers for use in different formats (epub, print etc.) In Booktype 1.6.1 we have included a feed of cover management activity to the history. So now you can see who and what updates have been occurring much more easily. What else is new? Booktype 1.6.1 now offers book deletion Deletion. In 1.6 we added the much asked for functionality, book deletion. In 1.6.1 we made further improvements allowing owners and administrators to delete books from the book info section as well as chapters. Booktype 1.6.1 now offers chapter deletion French localization. Now the Booktype interface is available in French! There are also a few more languages that are nearly finished that we hope to include in the next release. If you speak Portuguese, Albanian, Russian or Spanish get in touch with us if you want to help translate the Booktype interface. Bug fixes, bug fixes and more bug fixes (including Objavi). We have made many minor tweaks and updates to Booktype in 1.6.1. Take a look at all the improvements here:  Download and install Booktype 1.6.1 on Unix or OSX Get a Booktype Pro account for cloud-hosted publishing Like Booktype on Facebook [Less]

Django CircusIf I only knew how awesome the Django community is, I would have started attending DjangoCons way earlier. This year the European DjangoCon was held in Warsaw from the 15th to the 19th of May and believe it or not, it was in a Circus ... [More] tent! It was organised by members of the local Django community and they have really raised the bar for the next DjangoCon in France. Because Django is a central programming language for Booktype I decided to go and check the action from this community of developers and aside from learning a lot of cool new tricks I also had an amazing time! Fun in the sun The first three days of the conference were organised at the horse track, next to a weirdly big fountain and an old swimming pool. There was only one track at the time and that proved to be more than enough. The tent was open to the outside providing good airflow and easy access to the lectures. It was outfitted with power, WiFI, projectors, tables for those who can not escape their work and even a refrigerator filled with cold water and drinks. During the day people could easily grab coffee, fruit, sandwiches, homemade energy bars, ice-cream and popcorn in the smaller tent. The organisers provided us with hammocks, deckchairs, bean bags, blankets, frisbees, badminton rackets and many other toys. Many times it just felt like we were at a music festival and not a developers conference. Django experts visit the festival But it was not just about the food and frisbee. The event was packed with interesting people and projects, and this is what conferences are all about, meeting new people. Russell Keith-Magee (President of the Django Software Foundation), Andrew Godwin (Django and South), Tom Christie (Django REST Framework), Kenneth Reitz (Requests and Python Software Foundation), Steve Holden (Python Software Foundation), Zed Shaw and Aymeric Augustin (Django) were all present, just to name a few.  Coding sprint takes place at the Django Conference You could feel the spirit of open source and the Django community at the festival. Everyone was more than friendly and very approachable. I guess all the stories about how the Django and Python have one of the friendliest communities are true after all! The best place to see this was during the last two days of the conference. The coding sprint was organised at the Gamma Factory and the first day it was attended by more than 200 people. Instead of junk food the organisers provided us with more healthier meals. But enough about the food. Members of the Core Django team and developers who have already contributed to Django were more than helpful and patient with the newbies and people who just wanted to help with coding, documentation, testing or sometimes just organising old tickets in the system. It was a very positive and enriching experience. I encourage you to think about participating at DjangoCon next year or just visit one of the local Django/Python gatherings in your country. You will not know how stimulating it can be until you try it! As they say, a picture tells a thousand words! Check out the video from the festival. [Less]

A Day at Supermarkt with Booktype workshopping open source publishing What happens when you get a bunch of creative people in one room and set them up with a book publishing tool like Booktype? We at Sourcefabric thought we should try exactly that. ... [More] And so, last week, we ran a book publishing workshop at the great venue Supermarkt in Berlin, Germany. Inspiration calls from New Zealand The weather was stormy and rainy when almost 25 participants arrived. Booktype 'guru' and Book Sprint expert Adam Hyde called in from New Zealand to welcome the guests. His message to the excited crowd was, 'get comfortable with being accessible. You can see what everyone else is working on - and so can they. This is open source publishing.' One of the biggest advantages of Booktype is to prevent painful writers block. That means, when you work in a team you can always find help and bounce off other ideas. 'You are not alone', said Adam Hyde at the end of his introduction, 'talk with your facilitator'. This sparked a lively discussion around how to run, lead and operate a book publishing team and touched on the topic of workflow that kept coming up throughout the workshop! Workshopping workflow Participants at the workshop got hands on with Booktype Booktype can help organizing your workflow quite a bit. This starts with the dedicated chat window for team conversations, the history log and the setup for work groups that can make your editorial tasks much easier. Before we got started on the "hard work", the entire group was allowed to go on a little spin around the venue. The task was to take pictures, scout for ideas and chat with the other participants. The real deal Since we wanted to run the workshop like a realistic publishing set up we set deadlines. After less than one hour we produced our first version of our workshop book. 25 pictures, 12 chapters, six teams - easy. But this was not enough for us, we wanted more! For the second round we set up the participants to operate from different countries like Italy, Romania and Spain. The publishers had to communicate using the chat and through the chapters only. With the added new deadline, this round became a bit more tricky - just like in the real world. However, it also showed how easy it can be to publish a book with people around the world if we all communicate in the same 'virtual' room and take advantage of the technology on hand. Just an hour later, we proudly pushed the 'publish' button and the first edition of A Day at Supermarkt, popped out, ready to go. You can take a read through our book made with Booktype here! Do you want to participate in our next workshop or have us run a workshop for you? Contact us here! [Less]

Livraria 247 After two years running Brasil 247, the leading political website in Brazil, I've decided that our next business should be to move into e-books. As the readers shift from print to digital media, I thought the same trend would happen in ... [More] the book industry in Brazil. By the end of 2012, Amazon.com launched its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) in Brazil and I was among one of the first to open an account. The second step was to invite our columnists to organize their e-books. We've also selected some public domain books, from classic authors like Fernando Pessoa and Machado de Assis, to be published. Concerning the software we used to accomplish this, we decided to use Booktype because of the great partnership we have with Sourcefabric. The Brasil 247 website runs on Newscoop, Sourcefabric's open source CMS for news, and we thought our books should have their epub versions on Booktype. We also found that using Booktype was very easy to work with. Besides that, we consider ourselves more than clients of Sourcefabric. We are also friends.  After that we joined Google Books, to tap into the Android e-readers, and the iBookstore, to be part of the iOS e-readers. Once we were finally among these three Bookstores (Apple, Google and Amazon), we launched our very own "Library 247". Since then, we've sold many books and some of them we give away for free. We are really happy that we could also become publishers, offering books all over the world. And what is amazing is that we could do this with a very low investment. In the end it's not a money issue, but rather the satisfaction of offering writers the opportunity to publish their books with us. [Less]

  Photography | Florian Oellers | www.florianoellers.de This week: Sourcefabric launches Newscoop 4.1.1 and Booktype 1.6; TagesWoche wins the 2013 Medienpreis; Cluj hosts open organisations event; Newscoop-powered projects launch and meet the ... [More] expanding Sourcefabric team. Die TagesWoche-Delegation mit dem Preis. (Hans-Jörg Walter)   TagesWoche wins Medienpreis for local journalism Congratulations to TagesWoche, the Basel-based, award-winning hybrid newspaper. They have received the 2013 Medienpreis for their innovative coverage of local elections. You can read about the award ceremony on their website (in German). The Select and add multiple images to a slideshow Newscoop 4.1.1 improves image-handling Earlier this week we launched Newscoop 4.1.1. This release includes improvements to picture galleries and ability to add multiple images to slideshows. Image metadata can now also be edited directly from the image edit screen. For more details about this release check out our website. This is the cover manager overview Judge a book by its cover with Booktype 1.6 Now you can add one or more covers to your book and select the one you want to use at the moment of publishing. Different covers can even be used for different formats. For more details about the latest version of Booktype take a look at our website. Cluj Hub Open thinking for open organisations in Cluj On April 18 at the ClujHub coworking space, Sourcefabric hosted an exciting community event. Lightning talks from representatives of Mozilla, Ubuntu, OSOM (Open Source Open Mind) and local journalist Andrei Aroneţ presented the benefits of working in an open way. Check out more information about the event on our blog. The kobinet-nachrichten.org launch party in Berlin  Three new sites made with Newscoop This week was very busy for our implementations team with three exciting new websites launched with Newscoop. We designed Kobinet-nachrichten, the largest German-language website for accessiblity news now has a fully accessible web design. The Georgian independent news site, kavkasiatv.ge launched alongside Yemen's Women Power whose goal is to promote women's achievements in the country. Sourcefabric team members Sourcefabric welcomes new team members In the past weeks, Sourcefabric has expanded to include some new faces and fill out our global team. Pavla Holcová joins us as our new International Project Manager working from Prague. Yorick Terwejiden is joining our Newscoop developers in Berlin and Hervé Verloes will be working with our fundraising team remotely from Brussels. With all these new people we wanted to send a warm welcome to them! Sign up to the Sourcefabric newsletter to get vital dispatches and important news delivered to your inbox. [Less]

 Photography Florian Oellers | www.florianoellers.de When I started working with Sourcefabric last summer, one of the first tasks I was given was to check out Booktype and see why I wouldn't be able to use it for publishing books. I tried it out ... [More] , and my main problem ended up being the print output, which looked nothing like what I had seen on the screen while editing the book, and did not look good enough for being a book. I presented my findings and was told that it was not currently possible to print something looking the way it looked on the screen. "Really?" I thought, and decided to try some things out. After I presented my findings I was put in charge of BookJS -- a new PDF rendering engine for Booktype that promises to give Booktype the ability to create publisher quality books that make the view in the browser and the print look the same. BookJS is still under heavy development, but over the past nine months it has achieved quite a lot of things that had been impossible until now. These are some of the most outstanding features that BookJS currently has: Page Headers and Table of Contents Pages in books usually have running headers that specify the chapter and section. Also, one expects any book to start with a table of contents. If the programmer adding BookJS to your system specifies how section and chapter titles are specified in the input, it will create these elements by itself. Columns Browsers support columns, but if you try to print a page that has columns in it in Google Chrome or Apple Safari, they disappear. BookJS takes care of this and makes sure that books can have multiple columns that don't disappear if one prints it or creates a PDF with the browser. Footnotes BookJS footnotes At first sight footnotes seem extremely simple. They just go at the bottom of the page of where the reference to them is. But what happens if the insertion of the footnote at the bottom of the page means that the reference to it has to move to the next page? BookJS makes this happen. It can be done when printing or when showing a book as a static webpage in the browser. But even if one combines BookJS with a webbased editor so that the contents constantly change, it will make sure that footnotes and references are always on the same page. Top floats BookJS top float  Sometimes one wants to have certain parts of the content always at the top of pages, no matter where in the page flow it is. The most common examples are probably pictures or figures with captions. Top floats are similar to footnotes in that they should be placed on a page close to where they are placed in the content flow, but differently from footnotes, they do not have to be on the exact same page. It is more important that no unusually large spots of white space are left. Try it out! If you are using Google Chrome, check out these instructions to get BookJS working in your browser, and then head over to this test for a live example of how a top float and several footnotes work in a simple editor. To try out the live editing capabilities of BookJS scroll down to page one. Notice how it has a top float at the top that spans both columns and some footnotes at the bottom. Now click at the start of the paragraph that starts with "1 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." You will notice that a cursor was inserted in there. You can now add or delete any contents. To see how BookJS is able to move footnotes and top floats around, simply hit "Enter". This will create a new line. Keep the Enter-key pressed until you reach the next page, and you will see how the footnotes and the top float gradually will move on to the next page as the references move further down. BookJS and Booktype In the next installment of Booktype a basic version of BookJS will be integrated to be used as an alternative renderer. The upgrade, which came out earlier this week, will provide users with the ability to add page headers and give a PDF output that just looks a little bit better than what Booktype was able to do until now. If you are a developer, feel free to contribute and help expand BookJS. There are still many things to be worked on over the next few months -- such as word index capability or margin notes. Check out this blogpost that introduced BookJS.  [Less]

Start writing books collaboratively with Booktype!Booktype 1.6 is out today and at long last you can now judge books by their covers. Now add one or more covers to a book and select which one to use at the moment of publishing. Different covers can ... [More] be selected for different formats and Booktype supports multiple filetypes including vector (SVG), PDF and bitmap formats. Download and install Booktype 1.6 on Unix or OSX Get a Booktype Pro account for cloud-hosted publishing Booktype is supported on Unix systems like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and also on an OSX server. You'll need 3GB Ram and 1Ghz processor as a minimum hardware set-up. Booktype has got it covered. Here's your step by step guide to the new cover manager. Find the cover manager in the editing tabs 1. Go to Edit Book and the new Cover Manager tab. This is where you can upload, manage and assign covers. You can upload multiple covers for each book and assign different covers for use in different formats (epub, print etc.) This is the cover manager overview 2. The Cover Manager tab. This shows thumbnails of all the covers, and whether or not they have been approved. Anyone can upload, and the covers can be sorted by Approved and Pending tabs. Booktype supports multiple filetypes including vector (SVG), PDF and bitmap formats. Edit any book's covers and manage which versions they are for 3. Editing covers. Clicking the Edit button open the book cover's metadata. Of course you can edit this data, but you can also stipulate whether the cover is a front cover, back cover or spine and set it as a cover for print, ebooks and so on. Select the correct cover when it is time to publish 4. Select and publish. When you are ready to publish, the wizard guides you through the process, allowing you to select the appropriate cover(s) for the type of book you wish to output! What else is new? Try out the new beta renderer for books Beautiful rendering in beta. Under the hood, Booktype will soon be employing a new renderer making your books look better than ever. It's based on the latest WebKit browser engine and gives much more control over footers, headers and more HTML features. We've included here just a sneak preview for you to test. Watch this space for the full version. Deletion. Closing possibly the most requested feature ticket in history, books can now be deleted. The ability to delete users and groups is coming in 1.6.1! The rest. There are over 135 less glamorous (but no less important) fixes, improvements and updates in Booktype 1.6. For the detail fanatics, every single one can be found over in our bug tracker. Download and install Booktype 1.6 on Unix or OSX Get a Booktype Pro account for cloud-hosted publishing Like Booktype on Facebook [Less]

Lemonade stand | Photo credit Flickr Steven Depolo (CC BY 2.0) This article was first published on the Tools of Change for Publishing website.  That is a question I get asked all the time. And quite rightly so. After all, without the license model ... [More] and the source code being out in the open, free for everybody to download and do with it whatever they want – where is the actual product? And how do you make money with it? Sourcefabric has been in the open source business for years. We started out in journalism and radio, developing two tools called Newscoop and Airtime. We then started the development of Superdesk, catering to the more complex needs of newsrooms, with the idea of "create once, publish everywhere" at heart. What that means is multi-channel publishing of quality content to a variety of devices. Sound familiar, publishers? Then along came Booktype and all of a sudden we (Sourcefabric) were also in the book publishing industry. At the same time news organisations were starting to look at the book format to republish their already existing content, radio stations started to publish non-audio content and traditional "written word publishers" started producing podcasts. Book publishers were right in the middle of trying to make sense of the relationship between books and ebooks – a conversation not too dissimilar from the problematic marriage of print and online journalism. Sourcefabric has been working with existing content producers all over the world for years. We have a lot of expertise and a number of cool toys. But seriously – how do we pay our bills? The simple answer is this: Services. All our tools are free and open source and available for download and for repurposing by others. But not everybody has the technical skills or set-up to do that. Take Booktype for example. Some people might need secure hosting – we provide that service. Some people need support – we provide that. Some people need help developing extra features and functionalities – we can do that. And some organisations (publishers and print on demand services, for example) might need integration into existing workflows – we sure can do that too! When things get a little more complex, we work with clients on a thorough needs and workflow analysis, then we create a project spec with proposal and budget. A very important point is that we can do all that and we love doing it. But if you would rather work with other developers, it is up to you who you want to work with. The source code is accessible for others, which means other developers can download our tools and get right to the heart of them too. And as bizarre as that might sound, we are totally happy for that to happen. In fact, we actively endorse it. Of course, as the initial creators of the tools, we would like to think we are the best (and hence your best choice) at working with our own tools, but the more people want to work with our software and the more people that have the ability and a vested interest in developing additional functionality, the better for us too. It keeps us on our toes to keep producing the best possible solutions. And because we are in it for the long haul, that means creating a vibrant ecosystem with many active participants. One benefit for users is simply that even if Sourcefabric were to stop actively working on a certain tool, its future is not at all endangered by that move. The idea of an ecosystem is also important in light of the license question and the overall quality of the tool. Because although the licenses our tools are published under free the user from any payments for usage, the licenses (in the case of Booktype this is AGPL) include an obligation on the user's part to share any extensions or improvements so they can be brought back to the source code. That means that the tool gets better the more people use it. Imagine just 20 organisations are using Booktype, all with complementing needs (workflow, input / output formats, you name it). Each organization simply has to commission one improvement but can in fact make use of all new functionalities. Now, don't tell me that's not a good thing?! And at this point, I will take a direct stab at licensed software – all the money you pay for licenses simply gets you the usage rights for a limited time. If you invest even half of that in open source development, you not only get the product as it is, but you can benefit from customisations that some licensed tools simply do not allow. You have a lot more flexibility and you can really save a lot of money by going open source. Things can of course go even further than that. An integration of Booktype can have transformative effects on a client's workflow and sometimes even on the business model. In those situations, we work with our clients on much deeper analyses, we might even build certain prototypes, we train the teams and we create documentation. And in most cases, we provide ongoing support on a very personal level. When the technology we develop plays a crucial part in somebody else's business, a personal and close relationship is key to ongoing success. The more we can get under the skin of an organisation, find out about the people and traditions within it – stuff that has on first glance nothing to do with technology at all – the better we can respond to that. Sometimes that means technological solutions, sometimes that means something else. And thanks to our vast expertise across many sectors, industries and countries, we can bring some truly innovative and compelling ideas to the table. So that's how we pay our bills right now. The future for open source technology in innovative businesses is looking bright and exciting. We are also talking to other companies about joint ventures, we are regularly being asked (and paid) to present our expertise at conferences around the world. But all that only works if we are really good at what we do! And we are. For more information about Booktype and the recently release that introduced Reports, localizations and bug-fixes, check out the latest release webpage. [Less]

Tome Reader. Credit: Flickr | Ozyman CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Welcome to the era of book data. Everyone has been talking about data-driven journalism, but data-driven publishing is becoming just as impactful. Tools of Change (where we'll be speaking this ... [More] month!) produced a great video on this last year. Tools like Hiptype and Readmill are giving publishers analytics powers that were previously unheard of. It's a controversial topic too. Reading is often an emotional, private affair - are we happy to have people look inside our habits? As readers, do we want to be exposed us as perennial skim-readers or serial non-finishers? Do we want to read narrative-by-numbers and story arcs defined by data and tailored to exact demographics? Booktype believes that investigating and visualising data around writing activity in particular helps publishers streamline their processes, or helps writing communities, education and print-on-demand serve their authors better. The latest release of Booktype has all new email Reports, and here's how writing communities can get the most out of them. 1. Choose your timeframe Daily, weekly or monthly? This choice depends on the level of micro-management you wish to undertake.  Daily Reports are intended for platform administrators. They allow admins to keep an eye on server space and storage. Weekly and monthly Reports are perhaps better suited to aggregating data on writing activity, but if you want the kind of granularity that allows you to tie daily marketing campaigns to an uptake in new sign-ups, daily reports might just be what you need. 2. What's trending? Ever since Twitter introduced trending topics, everyone is obsessed with aggregating what the world is talking about. Well, how about knowing what everyone is writing about? Booktype Reports allow you to keep an eye on what chapters and books are hot right now. This allows community managers to offer support or promotion for exciting group editing, or provides management editors vital information on where a book is at in the production stage. 3. Reward unsung heroes Much collaborative writing work goes unrecognised. Contributions in the form of late-night style edits, translations, the minute proof-readings and copy corrections can often be missed, especially when they occur across multiple chapters or projects. Never again. Now you can identify the real stars in your community (or, indeed, who in the publishing team needs a raise). Numbers aren't everything, but they can help signpost when individuals go above and beyond the call of duty. 4. Writing rush hour There can be many reasons to want to know when people are writing. For starters, the marketing department love to know this kind of stuff so they can tie it in with social media pushes. Perhaps you run online support for your print on demand service? Checking out the peak activity times will help you be there for your community. And, of course, spotting particularly busy days may alert you to a pattern in writer behaviour that allows you to provide extra value to your clients. 5. Evaluate success If you are running any kind of writer-driven platform, it's important to know how many new users, books and groups you have. It allows you to measure churn, evaluate assumptions and pivot where necessary to make changes that bring your community better services. For publishers, this might also allow you to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in your team, stopping bottlenecks at the proofreading stage for instance. Moving forward... Reports are fairly basic right now. They allow you to keep track of... Most active users Peak times and dates for activity Number of new users, books and groups Total number of books, users and groups Server information (database and storage) To use them, you have to build scripts that generate them; check out the wiki pages here and here on how to do that. In the future, we'll add a bunch of export functions to allow you to push your data to spreadsheets and visualisation tools effortlessly. We'll improve what you can call data on - non-active users, hidden books, number of changes, average words per author. If you can name it, we can probably call analytics on it. Eventually, if demand is there, the current Booktype Control Center would be where more information would be gathered and visualised natively without export. So, let us know in the comments...  what data would help you grow your community? [Less]

Innovate through inspiration, evaluate with numbers: Booktype Reports. Booktype 1.5.4 has been released with multiple bug-fixes, new localizations and Reports, a way to get data on writer and book activity. Reports can be sent automatically via ... [More] email daily, weekly or monthly and highlight things like peak times of activity, number of new users and the most active books. There are two ways to get Booktype. Install it yourself, or sign up to our cloud-hosted platform. Download and install Booktype 1.5.4 on Unix or OSX (it's free!) Get a free Booktype Pro account for cloud-hosted publishing (starter account also free!) Self-hosting of Booktype is supported on Unix systems like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and also on an OSX server. You'll need 3GB Ram and 1Ghz processor as a minimum hardware set-up. Book data is the next frontier for publishers. Investigating and visualising data around writing activity, book creation or new users and groups helps publishers streamline their processes, or helps writing communities, education and print-on-demand serve their authors better. Booktype now allows Reports sent by email daily, weekly or monthly to show... 'Trending' books or chapters Most active users Peak times and dates for activity Number of new users, books and groups Total number of books, users and groups Server information (database and storage) To learn how to make the most out of them (and how to create scripts that generate your own reports), check out the blog post here. Booktype's interface has now also been localized into Spanish, Albanian and Russian, with more versions on the way in future releases. Communities can now localize the interface themselves too. Here's how. In addition to this, multiple bug fixes have improved editing, versions, groups and publishing. The release also coincides with a release of Objavi 2.5, the software that converts Booktype books from their native HTML into PDF for printing. It's now more stable, quicker and less resource-intensive. Future releases will unveil a cover manager and better support for producing ebooks. Check out Booktype on GitHub. Dive into the Objavi code. How does Booktype help publishers? By facilitating editing and translation and eliminating the need for wikis, cumbersome CMSes, or e-mailed word processor files, Booktype aims to promote and encourage the kind of collaborative writing process employed by South Africa’s Siyavula, who use it as a community hub for over 1000 teachers across South Africa to share class notes and to collaboratively write textbooks. Other early adopters include YouCanPrint.it who aim to be Italy’s first print-on-demand service able to offer authors the possibility to write, publish, and distribute books on one platform. Booktype enabled Internews to produce How To Bypass Internet Censorship, a 300-page book now available in nine languages, in five days. The 442-page Cryptoparty handbook, an internet phenomenon that was downloaded thousands of times on its release in October 2012, was written using Booktype in three days with 20 authors from remote locations worldwide.   [Less]