This User Guide is for the first time users to get familiar with inner workings of Lacuna Books and for the experienced users to be used as a quick reference.

Lacuna Books is a web application for writing books. It provides an editing tool tailored for book production and digitally publish your content into HTML, EPUB, and PDF books. In addition to text, it allows you to manage figures (images, files, tables, video clips, and code snippets), citations, footnotes, and references.

Lacuna Books tools are designed so that writers can focus more on content, less on formatting and placement of information. For example, when a writer wishes to place a figure (an image) in a chapter using word processor, she is expected to type in the figure number, caption, credit information where the image is supposed to appear. Try referencing the image in text body or adding the same figure in a different chapter— issues like data duplication and data mismatch are likely to happen. Lacuna Books avoids such problems by providing a central store for all of assets, and the writer simply points to which image is going to be placed where. And then Lacuna Books' rendering engine looks up its image data and takes care of figure numbering and displays 

By guiding writers to organize chapters in a hierarchical structure and manage assets and references in a central repository, Lacuna Books can automate many of tiresome tasks such as creating table of contents and bibliography and maintaining cross references.

• Store data in the cloud, enabling you to pull down your latest data from anywhere with internet connection
• Helps you organize your data in a hierarchical structure
• Allows you to manage images and files and store meta data such as image credit, description, and caption
• Helps you to create cross references to other sections and figures in the book
• Automatically creates table of contents, bibliography, list of figures based on data entered
• Allows you to invite co-authors and reviewers to collaborate
• Produces consistent outputs in HTML, EPUB, and PDF

• Does not provide any press service for producing hard copy
• Does not provide an offline editor
• Does not provide real-time editing interface with collaborators