I just had the best idea ever, and I need some help to get it off the ground.

The idea is called "Open Book Ware." To put it in short: Github for authors. It will work like Github in that a project will start, people will contribute with branches, the project starter(s) will merge branches, etc.

Ideally, the best complete books/stories will go off to publishing and the money from those books will go to charity/charities of the author's/authors' choosing (This would be way off in the future).

That said: I need help. If some of you would like to help with the website front-end, server/database back-end, etc., that would be very helpful. In addition, I'm going to try to make a git-like client for Open Book Ware.

So whaddaya say? Willing to give me help? PM me or email me at

Let's do this!

Do you think you can help with any of the programming/web design?

This is also a call for help post, you know

Can't really help reliably bit it sounds like a good idea.
You shouldn't put your email in clear mike that though (spam ).

Oh by the way. Git is very versatile and I think it's not worth reinventing the wheel. A dedicated website separate from github would be a good idea though since that is for code while books are totally different.

True but Github is very programming oriented. Also Pimath's ideas require that a new site be made since it's probably not in Github's goals.

Why not use GitHub?

I'd say you should still use git as the backend and just write some nice front end interfaces for it.

There's a Github GUI for Windows and OSX.

There is also a nice git GUI. That's what I would start with. That focuses more on code though and I'm not sure how well it would do with writing. Honestly I think we'd need someone who has done a good amount of collaborative writing to come tell us what would be wanted from a program like that.