WordPress as a backend solution for book publishing

[sleary]

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform popped up on one of my publishing feeds earlier today. I'm fascinated by the idea (as you can see from my comment there). Anyone know of existing plugins that could handle some of the things on the to-do list?

[Jeffro]

Hmm, would one of the things to do require being able to deliver blog posts as PDF files or an easy way to provide PDFs to the audience?

[norcross]

It's certainly do-able, albeit with a few non-WP functions added in. For the PDF conversion, something like FPDF would work (http://www.fpdf.org/) or HTMLtoPDF (http://www.rustyparts.com/pdf.php) although most have an issue rendering CSS (since CSS is client-side and PHP is server-side). Here's another tutorial on doing it: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/how...php_t4972.html

All in all, it could be done.

[xentek]

Publishing directly to PDF would not be the way I would go. I've done a fair amount of wrangling of PDFs at the code level. Its tedious work and everything you know about layout in the web world gets thrown out the window.

Check out this podcast from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, which goes into pretty good detail about their publishing process: http://assets1.pragprog.com/podcasts/show/12

They use programmer tools and a very unique toolchain that should inspire you to a different approach. Doesn't mean you can't have it driven from a WP data store, but I implore you to rethink going from DB → PDF.

[mfields]

IMO this is like going hunting for whales with a bb-gun. You should always use the right tool for the job and while this might be possible to accomplish we need to ask "should it be done"?

How will paging be controlled?
Text threading?
What about full color print-ready images in tiff format?
Proper support for data tables and columns?
What about different printers who always need "what they need" and nothing short thereof.
How about gutters, bleeds, crop marks and other such printy things that do not exist on the web?
What about cmyk color space for text?

WordPress does a great job of creating websites.
Layout programs do a great job of creating multi-page print-ready documents.