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I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding. I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way. As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

Contact Suw Charman-Anderson

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Booktype: Book Collaboration Made Easy

Writing, it is often said, is a solitary pursuit. Like many sayings, however, it’s only partially true. Few books are actually produced by one person in isolation. Co-authors, editors, proofreaders, translators, designers and a host of other people contribute their expertise and, without them, books would certainly be lesser.

But bringing those people together to collaborate on a manuscript has long been awkward and inefficient. Sending out a draft for comment and then combining different people’s changes into a single document, for example, is positively hellacious.

Launched today at the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference, Booktype from Sourcefabric* aims to change all that. A platform designed to support teams working concurrently on the same book, Booktype will make it easier for companies and people to collate, organise and edit content, and make it ready for publication.

Image representing iPad as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Booktype is based on the successful FLOSS Manuals platform which, according to its founder Adam Hyde, has around 8,000 users who have produced hundreds of books. It has been used particularly for non-fiction books where experts can come together to pool their knowledge.

Collaboration doesn’t just make the book better, it also makes writing books quicker. The Book Sprints project, for example, used the platform to write and produce Introduction to the Command Line in two days.

Unlike many writing tools, Booktype is designed to keep track of a large corpus of work, allowing users to import content, grab and swap snippets, and manage attribution where necessary. This kind of functionality would be invaluable for, say, bloggers wanting to turn years of writing into a book, or for companies with material scattered across departments that they want to pull together into a single publication.

Booktype also has social capabilities, with Twitter-like functionality that allows users to monitor what their collaborators are talking about and sharing, and chat for real-time conversations. If you need to discuss an idea or a problem, you can do so right there inside the tool. And because it’s all online, it doesn’t matter where your collaborators are.

When it comes to output, Booktype relies on CSS, JavaScript and WebKit, so everything can be done in the browser. There’s no need to reformat the book in, say, InDesign, (although you could if you wanted more granular control).

Booktype can format for a series of standard book sizes, then spit out several file types, including pdf, epub, mobi, odt and html files. It can also prep the book for publication on Kindle, iPad, and Lulu.com, even embedding fonts in the file, just as Lulu likes it. And if you want to, you can push the book to Lulu directly from Booktype.

I’ve had a play with the Booktype demo, and so far I am impressed. Book creation is quick and easy. A clean drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to manage chapters. A full history of changes means that you can compare edits and, if necessary, revert to a previous version. New users will certainly be able to get up and running swiftly and with little hassle.

There are a few areas where Booktype could use a little extra polish, though. I would love to see a way to import and turn into chapters large quantities of existing content, such as blog entries via RSS or documentation via batch upload. I’m also left a little confused about how to manage my collaborators. But Booktype is open source software, so not only can anyone download and run it on their own servers, I’m sure we’ll soon start to see plug-ins for WordPress and other functionality developed by the community.

Overall, Booktype is a very promising tool. I can already think of a half-dozen applications for it and am eager to get an installation of my own up and running. With ebooks becoming increasingly important to individuals and companies who have little or no previous publishing experience, tools like Booktype are going to be essential. Anything that makes the process of creating and publishing books easier has a bright future ahead of it and I’m excited to see how Booktype develops over coming months.

* Disclosure: I have previously worked alongside Douglas Arellanes from Sourcefabric.

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