"bookshop" - Where Ruby Meets DocBook

We are very excited to announce the early release of "bookshop."

Summary:

bookShop is an open-source Ruby-based framework for DocBook toolchain happiness and sustainable productivity. The framework is optimized to help developers quickly ramp-up, allowing them to more rapidly jump in and develop their DocBook-to-Output flows, by favoring convention over configuration, setting them up with best practices from the get-go.

The Goal:

To go from zero to exporting(pdfs, epub or whatever) from your DocBook source files in under 10 minutes.

Here's the rubygems page: https://rubygems.org/gems/bookshop

And the source code: https://github.com/blueheadpublishing/bookshop

bookshop currently works on Mac OS X, but can also be used on any *nix OS. Windows support is coming in the next couple of weeks.

To install bookshop:
$> sudo gem install bookshop

To create a new bookshop application:
$> bookshop new new_app_name

You can edit your book in the new "book/" subfolder, starting with the book.xml file

To build a pdf format from your DocBook source:
(from within the root of your new_app folder)

$> bookshop build pdf

Your new pdf book will be located in the "build/pdf" subfolder

Kindle eBook Design Resources for CodeMonkeys

A few helpful links for those of you designing an eBook for Kindle. This is geared for those of you who want to work with the source code (as opposed to those who are looking to simply convert from InDesign or Word to .mobi without caring for geekish specifics)

A great introduction for techie people already familiar with web-design

http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/kindle-formatting-for-web-geeks

Site for Kindle Formatting Tips

http://kindleformatting.com/index.php

Kindle's Publishing Program Page with goodies like

• KindleGen - a tool for generating .mobe (kindle) files from HTML, ePub, etc files
• KindlePreviewer - a desktop virtual Kindle for testing your code in a 'live' kindle display

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

The not-remotely-useful Kindle Publishing Guidelines Document from Amazon

s3.amazonaws.com/kindlegen/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf

A couple of nice web pages for cheatsheets on HTML and CSS compatibility:

http://www.ebookconversion.com/kindle-publishing-guidelines.htm

New Developer Hub & Upgrades

We are excited to announce the New Developer Hub for those who are interested in seeing how we developed and are developing the BlueHead site, Author's Dashboard, and Fan Club Site. We use Github (of course) to manage it all and have chosen to make the repository a public repository so anyone can participate as a developer and contribute (we will credit them in the "CONTRIBUTORS" file of the source code).

New Dev Updates:

• Upgraded system to Rails 3.0.1
• Moved hosting to Heroku
• Created sandbox branch for new feature adds

BlueHead switches to Highrise

After spending a little time working in Highrise, a Customer Relationship Management tool by 37Signals, it was clear that their "Goodbye to bloat" tagline was inherently obvious.

Our initial concerns in dropping SugarCRM (our current CRM tool):

• Would we miss all of the cool feature sets: detailed tracking for the entire customer pipeline from target to contact/deal, and crazy detailed reporting?
• Frankly, we never used any of the functionality. In point of fact we found ourselves constantly going back and forth about how to enter a contact... "Are they a target...or a lead...oh wait!...do we enter them here...or here...what's our procedure again?...oh crap! where did I put that note about my phone call yesterday?...wait, what's the contact's name again?"
• Would we miss the cool looking eye-candy of charts?
• NEVER USED THEM ONCE
• Sugar has been around forever and Highrise is relatively new
• Translation: Highrise is built for today's web without complicated retrofits
• Sugar charges an arm and a leg for all the web 2.0 stuff (that's right I said 2.0 as in 2.yesterday)

Anywho...

So it came down to one word: simplicity. As an independent, constantly-morphing publishing house living in a wonderfully evolving market, keeping it simple matters and we avoid the word "procedure" like the plague. If you need to wrap a procedure around complicated administrivia, it is just too complicated. At least, we try to keep that in mind.

AND, for all you tech-head types out there, they are a Ruby/onRails shop, so you know they are relevant!