Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

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> commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software

You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be many).

O'Reilly is working on a similar idea (http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.

Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.

> you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs

For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.

> their is adequate substitute products already in the market place

Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were adequate substitutes for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an adequate substitute for Google, and flash drives were an adequate substitute for Dropbox.

> Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.

A few years ago, when I first quit my job, I was originally going to start another magazine, but a previous experience in publishing had convinced me that I needed a version control system my writers, editors and advertising sales/production people could use. There wasn't anything available, so I started building something similar.

When I tried to validate it as an actual business, the biggest problem I ran into was that the vast majority of the (magazine publishing) business is in a shambles, nobody knows if they will have jobs in five years and everyone is understandably a little paranoid. Successful publishers could (hopefully) afford to pay me, but they were generally extremely bureaucratic, difficult to penetrate, and averse to change what was (sort of) working for them. New or floundering publishers were interested (and they were seeking something easy to solve this problem), but the most common feedback I received was that they'd love a free tier, but couldn't afford to pay for it.

The most interesting thing I saw during the whole process was an editor's version control system. This person edits a shocking volume using this system:

/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/from-author.doc

or

/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/my-edits-to-author.doc

You've definitely got a great idea and I can vouch that it's needed. Best of luck!!

Yes

Because formatting a book is painful. And you need to use the tools the publishers use (namely - InDesign)

And they import (keeping the styles) from: Word

What would be needed is a way to import from a Markdown type of thing to InDesign (or generate the PDF directly, and I'm not sure Latex caters to all the needs that InDesign caters to)

Penflip has markdown to PDF (and other formats) with a single click, with formatting and fairly well designed defaults. I included this feature as somewhat of an afterthought, but it's turning out to be one of the most used features on the site. So yeah, you're right - there seems to be some value in that.

Cool!

The problem with automatic conversions are the adjustments that are sometimes needed, as well as things like sideboxes, pictures, etc

But yeah, since it's been used a lot, looks like a very nice something to have. Good luck!

I agree, and I see a big market especially in academic publishing. A lot of course book text is written in a collaborative fashion with word docs emailed back and forth. Penflip could be to collaborative writing what Dropbox is to team file sharing.

Being a single cofounder might have been a negative factor, in your rejection.

well to be fair, your hitting a very crowded market that already has very established services with large userbases (If Google Docs, Word or Github just takes the idea then your basically done for) and there is a whole bunch of startups in the same exact space as you (Atlas, Editorially and Draft), that might of scared Y Combinator off because chances are one will thrive and the rest will fizzle out

"If Google Docs, Word or Github just takes the idea then your basically done for"

That is a very non-trivial task for any of those companies. Google could get closest fastest, but they're by no means going to churn something out in a month even if the good idea fairy hits one of their product managers. Microsoft, heck it'd take 3 years to see it.

I've seen a lot of PG's interviews where he literally says "Don't worry about competition". Dropbox released at a time when Google Drive was looming in the horizon. Still they succeeded. It's the execution that matters.

honestly though there was a pretty large gap between the time Dropbox came out and Google Drive did though, Dropbox was already established and had a large user base when Google Drive launched

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