Book-making with superpowers

The Electric Book template produces website, ebook, app and print books from a single content source. It is packed with features for professional book production, and lets team members collaborate on projects remotely. You’re looking at the default website it generates. The template includes:

• a blank book to start working into,
• a book of sample features to learn from,
• a demo translation, and
• how-to documentation. Read the docs

You’ll find the open-source repository on GitHub.

Basic features

Web, mobile, and print

Once your computer is set up, you can instantly output print PDF, screen PDF, epub, website and app versions of your books from a single content source.

Series and collections

Create a series or collection of books in one website or app. They can share common designs, features and metadata.

Fast and mobile-friendly sites

The template generates a static website, which is secure, easy to host, and lightning fast. It’s also designed to be mobile-friendly throughout.

Windows, Mac, Linux

You can use the template on Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Documentation

The docs you need are embedded in your project, including guidance on how to edit in markdown.

Online editing

Non-technical team members can make edits, submit changes for review, and explore project history with the Electric Book Manager. The EBM is separate software that requires setup and hosting.

Export to Word

Sometimes you need your book in MS Word format. For instance, an author might be working on a new edition. You can easily, instantly export books to MS Word.

Design and layout

Built-in book features

Select from dozens of built-in tags for common book features, such as boxes, epigraphs, sidenotes and bibliographies.

Easy design settings

We deliberately made the template look plain – it’s ready for your design decisions. Quickly change the design with dozens of simple settings, from fonts and sizes to the position of page numbers and the width of your sidebar. Then add your own CSS stylesheets. See the Electric Book Works portfolio for examples of what’s possible.

Mathematics

Include complex maths using LaTex notation. See a simple demo here.

Refined page typography

For high-quality print publishing, control letter-spacing in individual paragraphs for page refinement.

Optimised images

Automatically convert your master images to optimized sizes and color profiles. For instance, CMYK for print, and RGB at different sizes for large vs mobile screens.

Print PDF profiles

Easily control colour and PDF profiles for professional, large-scale printing.

Translations and variants

Translations

Add translations of a book to a project, and localise features like landing pages and button text.

Variant editions

Instantly generate variant editions of a book with different content or designs. For instance, a teacher’s edition of a setwork with extra teaching notes, all from the same content source.

Redacted PDFs

Tag text and images for redaction, then instantly output fully redacted PDFs without affecting page flow.

Interactivity

Bookmarking

Users can save their places, and the site will also automatically save their last location for the next time they visit.

Search

Search functionality works out of the box. Easily build and refresh search indexes for websites and apps.

Interactive questions

Add self-marking multiple-choice questions, and group them into quizzes. Add fill-in-the-blank questions to any text.

Video

Easily embed streaming video from YouTube or Vimeo.

Collapsible pages

Make long web pages collapse on major headings for easier reading. See a demo here.

Clickable slides

Let users click through slideshows, with useful equivalents in offline epub and PDF versions.

Extending and integrating

WordPress compatible

Do you already have a WordPress website? No problem. Electric Book websites are fully compatible with WordPress-driven servers.

Members-only option

Do you need to restrict book access to certain users on your WordPress site – like paying customers or authorised members? Use the Electric Book WP plugin.

Annotation

Turn on open annotation on website editions with Hypothesis. Useful for both public comment and private team discussions. See annotation in action on this demo.

Open-source software

The template is open-source software, so you never have to worry about being locked out of your own books, or finding yourself at the mercy of one vendor’s pricing. You can even change your copy of the software as needed.

Note that the template does use the excellent PrinceXML for PDF output. Prince is not open-source, and is available as a free trial. We are working on open alternatives.

Technical advantages

Free hosting

You can host an Electric Book site for free with services like GitHub Pages and Netlify. The template works out of the box with both.

Best-practice version control

The template is designed to work with Git version control software. We recommend storing and collaborating on your project on GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket.

Separate image storage

For books with many large images, link to remote media and build Google Play apps with expansion files.

Continuous deployment

For high-end, technical teams, easily set up continuous integration and continuous deployment with services like CodeShip.

Packaging projects

Need to share, copy, or archive a project easily? Instantly create a zip package of your project with one command.

Updating related projects

If you’re maintaining related Electric Book projects, keep them in sync with instant updates.