On Digital Publishing

you found pxcraft.pub — yay!

a publishing tool for digital books

We at pixelcraftbooks love books. We also love technology. But not much love is to be found where the two meet, to our dismay.

With current industry standards and tools there is little room for craftsmanship. Consequently there is little bookishness about the digital products sold as books today. So we had to create our own tools.

Finally, we are proud to present the first result of our efforts: A free and open digital publishing framework for digital books worthy of their proud heritage.

Let’s empower digital books to be their own platform: bake reading software into each book instead of writing books for proprietary e-book readers.

What is pxcraft.pub?

You can think of pxcraft.pub as a printing press for agnostic pixels. A publishing tool for smart, standalone units — books, just like their printed brethren, only that these books live in browsers.

All you need to do is put your content in a box and crank the lever: The machine turns it into beautiful, responsive HTML with book-functionality and design for you. The design gives you an effortless baseline so you can focus on custom functionality and beautiful enhancements. Imbue digital reading with awe.

We at pixelcraftbooks designed the pxcraft.pub machine for our own publishing endeavors. We wanted a machine that scales, is platform agnostic and lets us create the kinds of custom reading experiences we want to see in the world.

Leaning heavily on open source tools, the machine itself is free to use and free to tailor to your needs. It was designed to liberate content and to free the minds of creators from the mundane worries of publishing. It gives you the freedom to focus on your craft and imbue texts with awe.

We give it to you, because we believe the world deserves better reading experiences. We believe you deserve to be empowered to create them. Also, we are publishers, not software developers, and we want to spend our time producing beautiful books, not ecosystems.

do you love reading, too & want to help?

This is just a start. We would love your help to improve the machine: Use it, spread the word, help us write code, help us finance development or experiments with digital literature.

Need help putting it together? Have an idea how to improve? Join our mailing list to get in touch.