BookCafe

BookCafe is a writing app for anything with chapters. Write each one on a clean page, keep the whole book in an outline you can drag, and publish it as a website or a PDF that both open with a proper table of contents.

A book is a single file. Every chapter, every picture and every setting lives inside it, so you can move it to another machine, copy it to a drive, or send the whole thing to someone as one document and nothing goes missing.

Highlights

1. Write on the page, not in code - headings, bold, lists, quotes and links are one click away, and the page you type on is the page your reader gets.
2. An outline you can rearrange - drag a chapter to move it, drop it onto another to nest it, and a chapter you move carries its sections with it.
3. Sort without dragging - a long book reorders from a list, one step at a time or alphabetically, with nesting left untouched.
4. Pictures stay with the book - add an image and it is copied inside, so deleting or moving the original never leaves a hole in your pages.
5. Publish a website - one page per chapter with a contents sidebar, previous and next links, search and a light or dark switch. It needs nothing to run it: open the first page and it works.
6. Publish a PDF - a cover, a table of contents, page numbers and running headers, ready to print or send.
7. See it before you publish - the preview shows a chapter as it will read on the web or on paper, so nothing is a surprise at the end.
8. Links that stay honest - rename a chapter and every reference to it is updated; point at one that is not there and it is marked while you write, not after you publish.
9. Nothing leaves your machine - there is no account, no sync and no upload. Your book is a file you own, and it stays where you put it.
10. Counts as you go - words in the chapter and words in the whole book, always in view.

How it works

Make a book, and you get one chapter to start on. Add chapters and parts in the outline, drag them into the order you want, and write. Everything saves as you type.

When you are ready, choose a website or a PDF. Pick where it goes and the whole book is built, contents page and all.

Perfect for

1. Writers with a long manuscript - anyone who has outgrown one enormous document and wants chapters they can move.
2. Teams writing a handbook - onboarding guides, policies and internal manuals that need to read well and be easy to hand over.
3. Course and workshop notes - a website for students to read and a PDF for them to keep, from the same source.
4. Product documentation - a searchable set of pages you can publish anywhere, or hand to someone as a single file.
5. Anyone finishing a personal project - a memoir, a recipe collection, a field guide: something that deserves to end up looking like a book.