I second the call for supporting books. There are already quite a few books being published on GitHub and it seems like an almost natural way to collaboratively write a book that could forever kept up to date. Not sure if anything has been done specifically to support writing a book on GitHub.
I'm a grad student who writes lots of papers in LaTeX with collaborators. We use git most of the time, but git works most painlessly when you tweak it to ignore whitespace and to use word diffs. For example, let's say that my collaborator says "oh, I pushed a new diff" and now I'm curious what he added. Running:
git pull && git log -p -w --color-words
Also, if I have a conflict, it's also nicer to use a specialized tool to merge than relying on git's linewise merges.
I imagine github could incorporate some of these tools too.
> I imagine github could incorporate some of these tools too.
GitHub allows you to ignore whitespace in diffs by appending _?w=1_ to the URL [1]. They should make this more obvious with a button in the diff interface.
Thanks for the tip. I'm working on a short non-technical book so I'm hoping to do it in Markdown following the format of The Little MongoDb Book. That book is hosted on GitHub with the Markdown text output to PDF, mobi and ePub. Seems like the simplest way to get to a pretty nice looking book in the major formats.
In the short term, any small project like this that makes GitHub a little cooler is fair game.