Samuel Lavoie

PressBooks, a simple online book production tool built on WordPress, launches to the public today. It lets authors use a content management system they already know to produce ePubs, typeset PDFs and other XML formats, as well as a Web version. The Web version can be private, or it can be free or paywalled to the public.

PressBooks has spent six months working with authors and publishers to refine and test the tool. Big-time publishers like O’Reilly Media give rave reviews. This team is “dreaming up what ‘book production’ should mean (or, some of it anyway) in 2012 and beyond.”