Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkjU7EHJw0g

Leanpub is a site focused on helping authors write, publish and sell ebooks (PDF, EPUB & MOBI), while they're writing them and after they're done.

The big idea is that Lean Startup and Open Source principles should apply to how books are written. We feel that many books (almost all non-fiction books, some fiction books) should be self-published as ebooks as the author is writing them, before any publisher is involved. This way, authors get better feedback from their readers, and they can evolve their book with useful feedback.

For book authors, no simple mechanism for publishing in-progress versions of a book has existed, except for the beta book and early access programs offered by the best technical book publishers.

Currently we're focusing on two types of target authors: 1. technical book authors who want to self-publish their next technical book 2. bloggers who want to make books out of a curated and edited subset of their blog content

We support writing in HTML and Markdown: HTML is good for bloggers, Markdown is good for technical book authors. We also support external code samples for Markdown books with a simple syntax.

In both cases, authors edit their books on their own computers, in a folder that we automatically create and share with them via Dropbox. To produce a new preview or published version, authors just click a button on leanpub.com.

We recently pivoted to using Dropbox for all books, instead of our previous two approaches of supporting an in-browser book editor (it sucked) and Git integration (it was elitist).

We finally feel that we have a coherent product. We still have a lot of work to do, but we wanted to get some feedback.

Thanks