An author used GitHub to write a book

Posted by gershwin on Saturday January 31, 2015 @11:23AM
from the qz.com dept.

http://qz.com/335942/an-author-used-a-tool-for-programmers-to-write-a-book/

( 9 comments | 10 points | on HN )

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by sytse on Saturday January 31, 2015 @07:53PM (#8978687)

GitLab B.V. CEO here. Lots of people use GitLab as the infrastructure to write books. Examples are PenFlip.com (using thier fork of GitLab) and all authoring for O'Reilly Media (their Atlas platform is the frontend.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by _nullandnull_ on Saturday January 31, 2015 @04:54PM (#8978229)

Is this new to anyone? I have been using bit-bucket for writing a book for a couple of months. I figured this is pretty common. The Markdown language is great for writing technical material.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by gershwin on Monday February 02, 2015 @10:11AM (#8984491)

Gregory Gershwin here. I've seen a few people use version control for technical books, but I haven't seen much for fiction yet. And for young adult fiction, I think the examples are slim to none. I'm hoping that opening this works encourages people to think about other ways of writing/telling stories.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by psykovsky on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:17PM (#8978307)

>> Right, wonderful, we could see how your story developed, if you had used line wrapping in your text editor. As is this diff is not at all informative.

https://github.com/mcwm/novel_story/commit/e50c8ca7c583a6599...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by qznc on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:31PM (#8978350)

Github can do better with word highlighting [0]. However, I checked a few of my own commits and this seems to be unreliable. I very rarely view diffs on Github, so I do not really care. Maybe someone who uses it more ca comment how good the word highlighting works.

[0] https://github.com/blog/1885-better-word-highlighting-in-dif...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by jessaustin on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:23PM (#8978327)

It seems like an interesting question: which would be the ideal unit for diffing? For software we just use the line of code, but for prose perhaps it would be by sentence? Should the VCS notice when sentences are transposed? It seems there could be more tool development in this area...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by xkarga00 on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:39PM (#8978365)

Antreas Antonopoulos has been using Github for writting/editing Mastering Bitcoin (O'Reilly) as well

https://github.com/aantonop/bitcoinbook

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by aw3c2 on Saturday January 31, 2015 @04:58PM (#8978248)

What the hell, I scrolled down and got a football article instead. What kind of insane new design thing is that?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An author used GitHub to write a book by nacs on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:57PM (#8978410)

I've noticed a few online publications do this lately. They basically attach additional, recently-published articles in an endless feed as you scroll down to keep you on the site longer (similar to Pinterest/Facebook feed/Twitter).

[ Parent | on HN ]