This looks great. I was not able to find out myself: Where is the source-code hosted?
Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#52Awesome. I'll look into this when writing my thesis.
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#53This is very well put together, and makes me excited about the possibility of writing in the future. mhartl, I did your rails tutorial a few years ago with very little programming background, and it singlehandedly got me interested in programming enough to switch majors and spend all my time learning and building things. Thanks, and congrats on the launch!
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#54Bookmarked this for when I complete my novel :)
I know you are joking a bit, but if you were really thinking about jumping into writing a novel, being able to publish nicely formatted HTML chapters as you write them for free to people is a great way to get people interested from an early stage.
It's a model that has worked in the past for some people, including this recent example I heard about on NPR: http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/02/14/2014/andy-weir-th...
He slowly published each chapter, then when he finally finished the book, he posted the ebook versions for free on his site. Eventually he added it to Amazon (and had to attach a price to it because they don't let you give away ebooks) to help people load the ebook onto their Kindle with less friction than making them download and transfer the file, he found that he was selling more copies of the book than he was giving away for free on his site.
It's exactly that model of openly sharing what you are working on with the people that are going to use or be entertained by it that we want Softcover to encourage.
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#55This looks great. I was not able to find out myself: Where is the source-code hosted?
That is totally up to you. You can write your book and push changes to GitHub, store the book files in your Dropbox directory, tempt fate and just store them locally, etc.
Softcover just pulls in the HTML and eBooks that are compiled from the source code, as well as the book config files, and generates the views and links.
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#56Congratulations! Will use it. By the way, thank you very much, Mr. Hartl, for the rails tutorial. It was life changing for me, a former completely non-tech guy, now running my customs brokerage business trough a collaborative database tool horribly coded by me myself :)
edit: misspell
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#57I noticed that when changing from one chapter page to another, it loads much faster than the original rails tutorial, that takes forever. Nice improvement, still note a little latency though. It will be nice for people to study the Rails Tutorial Book when published on Softcover's new platform. Is going to happen?
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#58Bookmarked this for when I complete my novel :)
I know you are joking a bit, but if you were really thinking about jumping into writing a novel, being able to publish nicely formatted HTML chapters as you write them for free to people is a great way to get people interested from an early stage. It's a model that has worked in the past for some people, including this recent example I heard about on NPR: http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/02/14/2014/andy-weir-th..…
thanks for point to that, i hadn't seen it before, and
it's a great example of the experience many have had,
namely that giving away an e-book can spur sales of it.
-bowerbird
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#59How does this differ from leanpub?
Softcover is based on the Rails Tutorial model, which differs from Leanpub in several key ways. I actually think Leanpub is a great service if it meets all of your needs as an author, and in fact if it had met all of my needs I might not have bothered building Softcover. (Of course, Leanpub didn't exist when I first started publishing the Rails Tutorial in 2009, but I might have used it for follow-on products.) Here are some of the important differences:
- Softcover comes with an industrial-strength, open-source production system. This means you can write heavily formatted books with cross-references, code listings, tables, etc., and interactively build them locally, all without being locked in to a proprietary system.
- Softcover's HTML books are first-class citizens. The online version of the Rails Tutorial is a key part of its marketing strategy, so it has to be polished and prominent.
- Softcover gives you your customer list. Letting customers opt-in to share their email is fine for more casual authors, but it isn't ideal if (like me) you're trying to build a business.
- Softcover supports custom domains. It's important to me to use a custom domain for branding/SEO and so that I own my own traffic.
Re: Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
#60This is very well put together, and makes me excited about the possibility of writing in the future. mhartl, I did your rails tutorial a few years ago with very little programming background, and it singlehandedly got me interested in programming enough to switch majors and spend all my time learning and building things. Thanks, and congrats on the launch!
Awesome, glad to hear it!