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I am three quarters of the way through writing a non-fiction book using MS-Word and am at a stage where I am seeking feedback from lots of different people whilst regularly updating and correcting things. I recently heard of someone who created a book using wikidot.com. This concept sounds appealing, except that it would be a major effort to convert a large word document with lots of tables and diagrams into the right format for wikidot. I am looking for alternative suggestions where I can allow people to read the book easily whilst maintaining the ability to update chapters on a regular basis. It is not essential that I edit online, I am happy to edit chapters off-line and then upload. Any suggestions?

P.S. I am quite fluent in HTML, ftp etc.

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migrated from superuser.com Nov 26 '10 at 11:06

3 Answers

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The easiest and best option for you, in my opinion, would be the Word Web App or Google Docs, which both offer multi-user editing and version control.

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There's also Book Writer which let's collaborators/editors view content and add notes and changes and is specifically designed for people writing books (I know, there's a hint in the name). It's free and web-based and from the FastPencil people.

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+1: Very good web application. – chanchal1987 Nov 26 '10 at 14:34
Just tried to import from a word document and it failed. My file has quite a lot of formatting - tables, lists, pictures etc. I'm not sure if book writer can cope. I've written to their support email. – user4386 Nov 26 '10 at 15:02
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If you write the online book in pure HTML, learn Git, and use Github to host your book. Git is kind of like a peer-to-peer version control system. If you're familiar with Subversion or CVS, they have a repository on the server. Git distributes the entire repository, and you push and pull changes to other people's repositories.

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If this sounds too complicated, use Google Docs :) as jason404 said – jamiebarrow Nov 26 '10 at 13:27

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