Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 28, 2026

Booktype

Booktype is a free and open source software for authoring, collaborating, editing, and publishing books to PDF, ePub, .mobi, and HTML formats. It was launched by Sourcefabric in February 2012 when Booktype evolved from the Booki software, which powers FLOSS Manuals.

Last revised
May 28, 2026
Read time
≈ 2 min
Length
430 w
Citations
16
Source
Wikipedia ↗
Booktype
DeveloperSourcefabric
Initial release14 February 2012 (2012-02-14)
Stable release
2.3 / 15 November 2017 (2017-11-15)
Written inPython
Operating systemLinux, OS X
Available inAlbanian, Catalan, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian; translatable
TypeBookmaking software
LicenseGNU Affero General Public License v3
Websitebooktype.pro
Repository

Booktype is a free and open source1 software for authoring, collaborating, editing, and publishing books to PDF, ePub, .mobi, and HTML formats.23 It was launched by Sourcefabric in February 2012 when Booktype evolved from the Booki software, which powers FLOSS Manuals.45

In March 2015 it was announced that Amnesty International was using a pre-release version of Booktype 2.0 to publish its Annual Report on the state of human rights, in multiple languages.6

Booktype interface localizations are crowd-sourced from volunteers in a Transifex project.7

While Booktype is open source software, it also exports books to the proprietary desktop publishing software Adobe InDesign via the ICML markup language.8

Facilitators of the book sprint method - creating a book collaboratively in a short period of time - regard Booktype as a "specialist software for doing book sprints".9

Booktype is no longer under development.10

Organisations using Booktype

Amnesty International has been using Booktype for their annual reports three years in a row in 2014/2015, 2015/201611 and 2016/2017.12 Books on Demand), the European market and technology leader for digital book publications use Booktype branded as easyEditor for their self-publishing service.13 The Berlin-based publisher mikrotext uses Booktype for their entire catalogue.14

Nominations and awards

In 2016, Booktype was shortlisted for the contentSHIFT innovation award of the Frankfurt Book Fair but did not win.15

In 2017, Booktype won the Neuland 2.0 jury award for innovation in media and book publishing at the Leipzig Book Fair.16

References

References

  1. "Booktype Features".
  2. "Who's the Patron of eBooks? (FOSOTNTT)".
  3. "Meet Open-Source eBook Editing/Publishing App 'BookType'".
  4. "Booktype Launches Crowd-Sourced eBook Tools".
  5. Charman-Anderson, Suw (14 February 2012). "Booktype: Book collaboration made easy". Forbes.
  6. "Why Amnesty International uses Booktype 2.0 for report publishing". 25 March 2015.
  7. "Booktype localization on Transifex".
  8. "Adobe InDesign integration with Booktype's publishing platform". 16 March 2017.
  9. "What is a booksprint? And introduction".
  10. "Sourcefabric Booktype". 9 June 2022.
  11. "New Booktype output features create laid-out, print-ready PDFs across languages". 25 February 2016.
  12. "Amnesty's Annual Report, a case study in single source publishing". 13 March 2017.
  13. "Software-Tipp: Bücher gemeinsam online schreiben, lektorieren und in Buch und eBook umwandeln". 13 October 2015.
  14. "mikrotext und Booktype". 29 September 2015. Archived from the original on 9 August 2016. Retrieved 18 June 2016.
  15. "CONTENTshift veröffentlicht Shortlist". 8 September 2016.
  16. "Neuland 2.0: Abook und Booktype holen Startup-Preise der Leipziger Buchmesse". 26 March 2017.
External links