Book Oven is an online toolset that helps individuals and groups to make, improve, publish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for independent writers, designers, editors, and small presses.

We are currently still in development, and want as much feedback, criticism, complaint and kudos as you can muster.

Book Oven was started by Montrealers Hugh McGuire and Stephanie Troeth, and has been built by a group of great people.

1. You upload text of a raw manuscript.
2. You either invite collaborators (editors, designers, reviewers, proofreaders), or find them on our site.
3. You work with editors/reviewers to improve your text - depending on permissions your editors can leave annotations in the margins of your text, or directly edit the text.
4. You can use Bite-Size Edits to proofread/co-edit your text - either by yourself, in a private group, or by opening your project to the world.
5. When you are ready to publish your text, you can generate an .epub ebook file, or PDF.
6. Eventually you'll be able to generate a PDF formatted for print-on-demand.
7. Eventually you'll be able to sell the epub and print-on-demand book in the Book Oven store, and through partner retailers.

The basic toolset of Book Oven is and will be free, though we will take a small percentage of books sold; premium services will eventually be added.

You keep all copyright on your projects in Book Oven. You relinquish copyright on any edits you do for other people's projects.

Not yet, but we will!

Right now we don't have the mechanisms for collaborators to get paid, but eventually project owners will have that option if they choose. It's early days yet, but we expect that collaborators on projects could be paid fees for service, or a percentage of sales of finished books.

Bite-Size Edits is an experiment in solving one of the great conundrums that has puzzled humanity since at least 1440, and possibly long before: how can proofreading be made ... fun? Bite-Size Edits was our best effort. It is designed specifically for proofreading, and certain kinds of copyediting, not for more contextual editorial feedback.

You can use Bite-Size Edits alone, or in a small group of trusted editors, or you can open your project up to the world. When you turn Bite-Size Edits on a Book Oven text, the following happens:

• your text gets broken up into sentences.
• those sentences are served up to Bite-Size Editors at random (editors can be, depending on your preference: you alone; a private group you invite; or the world at large).
• this allows editors to focus on the *sentences*, out of context, meaning that it's easier to see errors and to see sentence structure problems.
• you get to accept/modify/reject all edits.
• when you are done, you turn off Bite-Size Edits.
• the system "rebuilds" your text, putting the sentences back together in the right order...

Bite-Size Edit texts come from individual writers, small publishers, and from the public domain. Some texts are new texts in need of proofreading, other texts have been converted from print form to digital, and need proofreading before being released as ebooks.

You donate your edits to the owner of the project, just as others donate their edits to you when they proof your work. It's a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" arrangement!

Yes.

Not right now, but if the project is public, you can check it out by clicking on the project title from Bite-Size Edits.

Not right now, but if the project is public, you can check it out by clicking on the project title from Bite-Size Edits. If the project is public, you can read the whole thing.

Proofreading is a daunting task, but sharing the load with a group of editors can speed up the time it takes to get your book proofed. If your book is 100,000 words long, it would take 100 people just 10 minutes to proof it.

Bite-Size Edits might also be more accurate than a single person proofing. Bite-Size Edits decontextualizes content, making it easier to spot mistakes.

Bite-Size Edits serves only a small snippet at a time, in a completely random order which makes it almost impossible for other people to make a plain copy of your original manuscript.

But even if you choose to make your whole work available online in a single file, it's very unlikely that someone will try to pass your work off as theirs - the risk for them is just too big. In most countries, copyright law ensures that you own the copyright to your own original work as soon as it is committed to a "fixed" format, e.g. as soon as you type it up on your computer. This means that you automatically have legal protection for your work regardless of what you do with it online, and could take action against anyone who breached your copyright. In reality, this sort of copyright infringement almost never happens.

If you still feel that you'd rather not show your snippets to the world, you can always turn the Bite-Size Edits off for your project. Don't worry, it's only one part of a raft of services we offer.

We doubt it. Professional proofreaders are highly skilled and there are many more books out there that need their eyes than will ever be on Book Oven. Indeed, we think that Bite-Size Edits will be a useful tool for professional proofreaders. And we hope Bite-Size Edits will make it easier for independent writers and small publishing houses to publish error-free books, which, in the balance of the universe, is a good thing.