Netlify for e-books?
Imagine that you push up some markdown files into a repo in GH and then the service automatically takes those markdown files, compiles them into a PDF/ebook with a nice font, nicely formatted code, auto-generated table of contents. It would automatically update every time you push an update.
Definitely focused on an audience that wants to use git/GitHub to manage their writing, ie, developers.
You could probably wire in a Gumroad-style landing page too so all you need to do to sell an e-book is push content into GitHub.
Interesting idea. Netlify for books.
Contrary to few of the suggestions below, let me take a slightly different route to solving this one. Let's apply First Principles thinking, if you may.
First stop. When you say markdown files -- my assumption is that you're talking about the manuscript side of story. And the manuscript will center around the life of the writer who is also somewhat a developer–since Github and compilation and all that jargon.
This is what leanpub does, but then it is NOT (claims aside) a Netlify of books. It doesn't even aspire to be one. Leanpub let's you publish drafts of work-in-progress books as digital files. It centers around the life of a writer.
So what is Netlify of books?
One that focuses on the life of the reader.
What do the readers want? Books. Obviously. So when I want to reader a Harry Potter title, I don't think of the file format, compatibility, the technology under the hood. I just want to read Harry Potter–the book. I don't care about markdown, pdf, epub or any of that shit -- just give me the damn book.
Or a paperback (if you will), which is what most people end up with.
There's more to get into here, but that's mostly where we are at with a Netlify of books per se. It's an unsolved problem. What are you thinking? 😇
Thanks for the different perspective @marvindanig!
If I’m not mistaken, you’ve got a couple products is the book space. I think you’re the maker behind bookiza and bubblin.
So, on the analogue of Netlify, I think Netlify is targeted at developers and enabling a build pipeline that takes code and puts it into a hosted environment quickly ... and delivers the user-focused experience in a way that enables fast and secure web sites.
I think the idea is similar, here: Focused on writers for a technical audience, and a “build” pipeline that results in an e-book that can be delivered to readers seamlessly. On that model, it’s close to what Leanpub does.
I’m curious to hear more about what you see as the unsolved problem, if you can share. What about you thinking about on the reader angle?
Ha! Yes indeed, those are my side/weekend projects.
You know what, we should hang out at six feet sometime! 🤙🏻
I live quite close to you, in Reston. Coming back to the thread, yes -- I agree with you that the tool-chain for the writer must be simplified a lot.
It's just that when we apply first principles thinking to the idea of a book, we arrive on certain results that are completely orthogonal to the solutions that are available on market (like leanpub).
I have pretty strong opinions on this topic, maybe we can take this discussion elsewhere/on email? I'm at marvin@bubblin.io.
@marvindanig, nice! I'm in Arlington, about .5mi from Ballston. We should do a socially distanced hangout sometime.
I'll drop you a not on email so we can take up this thread a bit more. I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts / opinions on the topic.
It exists already and it is called Leanpub. But of course, you can create something better :)
Nice! I didn’t know Leanpub did markdown and GitHub integration. Gonna look closer at that... thanks for the pointer!
How would it be different from github pages? You push markdown, choose a template, and your site is automatically published.
Or a more "marketplace" approach is gitbook, where clients (readers) can also browse through available content. But the publish pipeline is essentially the same
Great question. And right, it's a publish pipeline like Github pages or gitbook.
Github pages supports static site generators and provides static site hosting (essentially file hosting + serving requests). This idea would be turning markdown into an e-book format (PDF, .epub, .mobi) when you push into GH. So, same idea... there's a build pipeline but the result is an e-book rather than a static site.
Gitbook is great for generating web-based documentation from a git repo, but I don't think they support a e-book format.
This is something I'm considering for CourseMaker to make it easy to make accompanying ebooks for students who prefer books to video.
I think there is something to this blend of static sites/markdown/ebooks
Thanks, @ChristopherGS! Can you say more about this use case? What form is the content now? (Or maybe course writers are developing it on your platform?)
Just a hunch right now - but there's a lot of courses that have accompanying ebooks, I'm thinking how to maximize the overlap between lecture & ebook creation so that it is the least work (e.g. using markdown everywhere, lectures convert to book sections). Needs more user research at this point
Interesting idea!
Btw, how are things going with PremiumJS? ;)
Thanks, @jakeprins! I have left some of the stuff up for PremiumJS but am not actively working on it. The technology part of that project is interesting, but the actual business case turned out to be a lot harder (usual story, I’m sure). Individual creators and developers are probably not right to support a product like that, although maybe a place to start. The market right now assumes OS as the de facto standard and doing something paid has a lot of friction to overcome. Also, folks are able to really successfully dual-license stuff and sell licenses but distribute via npm. Handsontable is a good example of this. There’s probably an angle for enterprise teams, but I didn’t want to try to bite that off as a solo-creator ;). So I’ve kind of left it for awhile to see if something changes in the landscape.
Ahaa I see... I like the idea of PremiumJS, but I think you are right and it will be a very hard market. It still has potentials, but it's risky to put so much effort into building something without clear signals of proof.
The technology seems cool to buildWhat is your tech stack did you use to build PremiumJS?
Your new idea also sounds promising ;)
I was using a combination of a NestJS server for all the API stuff, and then a verdaccio server with some customer plugins to create a npm registry. It was mostly operational locally but I didn’t deploy it anywhere ... in part, I wasn’t fully sure how possible the technology was.
Gonna keep testing it out a bit on IH and try to not get carried away and start coding ;)
Interesting idea! I can also see this being valuable for Lead Generation wherein you have a blog post a la "The ultimate launch checklist" and your blog post is automatically translated into a downloadable .pdf one can grab in exchange for an E-Mail address.
Most of the Checklist Lead Magnets I downloaded were literally just that. The blog post wrapped into a pdf.
Thanks @pmuens. Interesting! There could be some interesting approaches here turning blog content into re-usable content... will consider this!
Sure! Keep me posted as it's also something I'd be interested in...
Yeah something like this is a great idea. I was helping my fiancé recently look into e-book publishing options, and I couldn't believe how fussy everything seemed.
I definitely like the idea of creating a simple and straightforward book creation/publishing "pipeline" - I think you could expand your audience a bit (if you're interested) by perhaps supporting dropbox or something as well, similar to how blot.im does.
Thanks, @mikes_. I was looking around at ebook publishing stuff, and I agree... seems a little kludgy. What did you end up using for your fiancés ebook?
Dropbox integration is a good idea to expand the audience to non-developers (definitely a larger group!).
We ended up just making a PDF! Decided to keep things simple for now :)
Leanpub supports Dropbox too.