Building an eBook using GitHub

03 Jun 2013

At Connexions we build free textbooks. To do it we have roughly 4 services:

• Published Repository (Published Books)
• Authoring Repository (Drafts)
• Generate exports (EPUB, PDF)
• Website

As someone who uses GitHub and Travis daily, I wondered how much of this GitHub (and Travis) can do for us. It turns out, quite a bit. If each book is a repository whose contents is an Unzipped EPUB then amazing things are possible.

Book Publishing = GitHub Repo + GitHub Pages + “Download as Zip” + Service Hooks

• the master branch is the published version of the book
• tags are various editions of a book
• gh-pages branch can be used as a book reader (Website)
• “Download as Zip” is the EPUB version of the book
• The editor can “save” via the GitHub API
• Travis-CI can be used to generate a PDF (and “push” to AWS or some other place)

So, I took our editor and made it save EPUB files to GitHub and viola, a book editor using GitHub!

• the WYSIWYG Book Editor and Demo
• the PDF-CI server and demo that generates PDFs on commit
• example of the book reader using gh-pages and epub.js