When a complex e-book project involves several contributors and multiple formats, you'd need something more powerful and flexible than a standalone desktop e-book authoring application. Enter Booktype [1], a cloud-based open source e-book authoring platform that provides a comprehensive set of editing and collaboration tools.

Booktype is designed to encompass the entire e-book publishing process: from writing and versioning content to generating ready-to-publish files in all major e-book and print formats. In addition to that, Booktype features collaboration functionality that allows anyone involved in the project to work on the book and communicate with other users in the process. In short, Booktype makes an ideal platform for managing an e-book project from start to finish.

Like many open source cloud-based applications, Booktype is available as a hosted service called Booktype Pro [2] and a software distribution that you can deploy on your own server. Although Booktype's manual provides relatively detailed instructions on installing the software on Linux [3], deploying Booktype for production use requires some technical chops. Add to this the time and effort you need to put into running and maintaining a self-hosted Booktype instance, and you might appreciate the appeal of the Booktype Pro service.

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