Note to self: Leanpub.com disrupts book publishing industry, it took them just ~ 11 months (EDIT: 2 yrs - look below) to get traction. Surprisingly, their original post got just TWO karma points:
It took a bit longer than 11 months: Eric Ries was our first customer (a good first customer to have!), and his first sale was on April 21, 2010. So it took about 2 years.
When we launched we were based on a hacked up version of WordPress MU. We've pivoted a couple times, and Leanpub today is based on writing your book in Markdown on your own computer (or iPad), and syncing with Leanpub using Dropbox.
Along the way we had a brief period where we used GitHub instead of Dropbox, but we felt that limited us to only highly technical authors. (We do use Git internally still, but Dropbox is a lot more accessible and it makes our publish workflow really nice.)
By the way, thanks very much for linking to that post -- you've more than tripled its karma points!
I guess a year ago we were slightly ahead in our timing, or my post was too long, or (probably) I didn't emphasize Eric Ries and Venture Hacks enough...
You are welcome. I've studied what makes a story be picked up. It's mostly time of the day and the name of the submitter. Here are my partial findings:
Yes, sorry about that. We've been rather slammed today.
The short answer is that we don't support it. We could if we were just using LaTeX => PDF (which we do), but then things would blow up when doing epub and mobi.
I'll take this as another vote for the feature, though :).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397
Getting Mr Braithwaite to publish at Leanpub.com is also a sign of success.