We believe

• Authors should be paid well for their work. PeepCode Press pays authors a 50% royalty.
• Publishers should provide valuable services to authors. Anyone can put a PDF on a website and offer it for sale, but PeepCode Press also designs informative illustrations and diagrams to enhance your minibook. We’ve built a workflow that creates backwards-compatible multimedia PDFs and hypertext with images for viewing on the iPod. Output for other handheld devices is also a possibility.
• Publishers should promote their authors and provide an easy way for people to purchase books. The PeepCode website is fully functional and makes it easy to release, revise, and sell multimedia PDF minibooks. Thousands of PeepCode credits have been purchased and can be spent on upcoming minibooks.
• Books should communicate well and use available technology where it enhances the learning experience. PeepCode Press minibooks include short screencasts, audio clips, and animated diagrams. All content degrades gracefully for reading in Apple Preview and other PDF-viewing applications. The PDF format is capable of color, animation, video, audio, hyperlinks, and high-resolution images. Books designed for the PDF format should make use of these capabilities.
• Books should be written in a format familiar to the author. The PeepCode Press workflow starts with Textile or Markdown (plus a few custom tags). Authors can literally start their minibook from a blog post while still seeing the benefits of syntax coloring, hyperlinks, and other rich formatting.
• Books should be current and cover cutting-edge technologies. The PeepCode workflow mentioned above makes it easy for authors to update their content and for PeepCode staff to release updates with minimal effort. The efficiency of the process enables authors to write on cutting-edge technologies even before they are officially released. Some of the best-selling PeepCode screencasts have covered unreleased software, such as the RESTful features in Ruby on Rails 1.2.
• Books should look fabulous. PeepCode Press designs books to be both consistent and customized. Instead of just pushing your content through a stock template, we’ll enhance the design to present your content as the unique and valuable work that it is. We’re typographical nuts and can combine attractive design with technology in ways that few can.
• Readers should be sold a minibook that works on the greatest number of portable devices. PeepCode Press minibooks will be DRM-free and available for download as a multimedia PDF, standard PDF, or hypertext package for viewing on the iPod. Audiobooks and other formats are also planned.

Here is a small sample:

PeepCode Press Author Details

A Boutique Publisher

While there are many publishers selling PDF’s, no one is doing it with the combination of artistic communication, technological packaging, and author respect that I’d like to see.

And what about all the developers learning Rails in languages other than English? It’s expensive to translate, print, and ship a paper book, but it’s much more feasible with a PDF minibook. I already have people interested in translating this content and making it available to a wider audience.

In the past two weeks I’ve been contacted by four people hoping to publish minibooks. They didn’t even know that this announcement was going to be made! If you’re interested in writing for PeepCode Press, I’d love to talk to you via email or in person. I’ll be at RailsConf Portland May 17-20, Ruby en Rails Amsterdam June 7, and Ostrava on Rails at the end of June.

Contact peepcode@topfunky.com with ideas, questions, topic suggestions, or proposals.