One Decade of Bookalope
A conversation between Kari Hill and Jens Tröger

Kari Hill is a writer and emerging screenwriter based on Wadi Wadi, Dharawal Country (Wollongong, Australia). With a Master of Journalism and a deep passion for heart-led storytelling, Kari has written for various publications and led community-based creative projects. She works in close collaboration with local creatives and community organisations, ensuring her storytelling remains connected, inclusive, and culturally informed. Kari’s broader work also spans youth engagement, community storytelling, and nature-based creative practices, and her short film Spirals, a poetic exploration of grief, Country, and transformation, was selected as one of only 25 projects nationwide for Creative Australia’s prestigious MATCH Lab program. With Spirals entering its next stage of development and production, Kari continues to focus on projects that uplift community voices and create space for healing through story.

Introduction

As a writer there is such a creative expression with reaching for my pen, oh indeed I like sometimes to use my feather quill. Or perhaps you like to type at your Remington as the sun warms your back on a crisp winter morning… Whatever way we writers chose, it’s a creative flow. I liken it to a painter, as they ooze out their paints onto their palate, and tune into an inner quiet, a meditative space of creativity, to perhaps share aspects of our inner world to the outer world…. We are artists, not administrative staff.

I usually write in my van as I hear the waves crashing against the shore. I love the creative process and I don’t want to spend too much time on the design and structure of my work. I want to be in the thick of my creative process…

And then, how can I avoid painful hours spent on cleaning up my document? How can my manuscript be ready for publishing? How can I save time, money, and still create a wonderful book?

Have a look what I found!

The beginning

I met with Jens Tröger, founder of Bookalope; a software tool that structures, formats and cleans manuscripts to create beautiful books. Bookalope celebrates its tenth year! We had a chat about Bookalope’s journey and his own, about its name, all that’s beautiful, the ugly, the fun, the frustrations and what’s next?

More than ten years ago^* Jens got into ebook design and spent a lot of time cleaning up manuscripts rather than indulging in the creative process. He got bored pretty quickly with the manual labour, and drawing on his PhD in Computer Science began writing short programs to solve many of these tedious tasks. Later, Jens was able to leave his day job, combine all these tools behind a website and Bookalope was born.

LinkedIn’s automatic profile update to celebrate the Bookalope anniversary.

Bookalope, what an interesting name! I can understand the ‘book’ part and was curious to know more, what was the inspiration for the rest of the name? It turns out that in its early days Jens was living in the Pacific Northwest of the USA and there was a popular folklore about the Jackalope! Wow the Jackalope! I wasn’t aware of these creatures. Though my daughter, an avid animal admirer, says they’re mythical creatures, a jackrabbit with antelope horns. And from the Jackalope and Jens’ love for books it was only a short step to… Bookalope!

Mountains of work

And what is Bookalope to Jens?

“Bookalope at its core is a project of passion. It combines my love for books, typography and technology. Bookalope to me is a playground where I can find that synergy between what is possible to automate when we talk about creating books: building books in a modern workflow and what remains kind of the fortress of human creativity. Because if I am a book designer then what I want to do is be creative with the design, I want to express the structure and content of the book visually, beautifully, play with the fonts, spacing etc. I do not want to count commas, tweak spaces, or check spelling.

“Now, in order to have this creative space and freedom, I need the book to be clean and structured well in the first place — and to get to that clean and consistently well-structured book that is where Bookalope comes in. Because that structure is at the core of having a beautifully designed and accessible print and ebook, and it is essential for the next steps in any book production process.”

In summary, this is what Bookalope does best: it turns rough manuscripts, existing ebooks and other document formats into clean, well-structured documents ready to create beautiful books from.

Then Jens talks about the archaic publishing industry mentality and how it has often been difficult to share his modern and specialized toolset for creating books. “There is a stuck-ness, a political rigidity, and sometimes simple incompetence and technical ignorance which keeps them (the publishing industry) from moving forward, from evolving, from catching up with modern technologies and mind sets.”

I can sense Jens’ frustration, and he continues by sharing how publishers often complain about the tedious, expensive old processes that are ‘broken’ though when he presents them with solutions they don’t seem to want to hear about it. “The publishing industry is stuck with outdated (printing-press) approaches, and an unwillingness to change.”

“Personally, though, the most disappointing experiences were the attacks,” Jens says with an irritated edge to his voice. “Submitting presentations to conferences that should care about ebook production, and then being told that I’m not welcome. Being approached by attendees saying that they will never consider to use or promote Bookalope, because it threatens their business.” A repeating sentiment, he says, seeing technology as a threat rather than an opportunity.

“But that’s not all,” he continues, “Over the years I was approached by three different companies who claimed to want to collaborate, their technical folks interested in Bookalope’s internal architecture and details, and especially how our structure classification AI works. On one occasion I halted the conversation and asked them to sign an NDA at which point they disengaged completely. Months later, these companies released ‘new features’ that more or less mimicked exactly what Bookalope is doing.^† It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s also a compliment of sorts?

“Yes, Bookalope indeed is a departure from traditional, expensive, and manual publishing workflows that consume time and resources. But it also is an opportunity to rethink how we create books, how we can spend more time on being creative instead of being bogged down by manually labouring through large page counts.”

It appears to be a near impossible task to challenge publishers to rethink how they create their books, to nudge them away from their existing sluggish, messy and archaic workflows that seem to have changed little since Gutenberg.

And indeed, American publishing entrepreneur, environmentalist and author Karen Christensen writes and echoes Jens’ frustrations in one of her blogs:

“[…] part of the delay in publishing is that book production systems are staggeringly inefficient. This is not because there aren’t better tools […], but because no one in the zombie production department wants to change.”

Oooh zombie production departments…^‡ No wonder they are hesitant about questioning their own status quo, about considering updating and changing their publishing workflows with modern processes, let alone considering AI-assisted tools like Bookalope. I also had this feeling towards anything connected to AI: it really freaks me out! Argh…. Modern media, unfortunately, often exaggerates and shows two opposing views of AI, either as something perceived as a ‘threat’ or ‘magic solution to any problem’.

So, let us bust some myths around AI-assisted publishing tools.

Sometimes a tool is just a tool

Jens has attended many publishing conferences over the years^§ and finds that people often misunderstand what Bookalope has to offer. “Publishers seem fearful and think that Bookalope will make editorial, creative, and production staff redundant.” Though as the maker of Bookalope Jens clears up these misconceptions. He talks about how Bookalope “takes the misery out of it” and rather than spending days and weeks manually going through hundreds of pages of manuscript to clean up headings, spacing, or random formatting, Bookalope automates these tedious and repetitive tasks. “It’s a real opportunity, not a threat. Bookalope is an intelligent tool that helps us create better books — better here meaning clean, consistent, well-structured, and for ebooks with rich accessibility. It is not a replacement of our creativity, but instead a tool to better support the creative process. That is what I use it for. Bookalope pushes this limit and it’s doing a good job at that.”

Another misconception is that publishers seem to think that AI can solve the entire problem of creating and designing a book. Jens laughs and says, “they think AI is a magic wand that we feed data into and almost any arbitrary problem will be solved. Instead I need to be very careful with how I train AI software so it can solve a specific problem appropriately and reliably. For example, if I have a number of broken ebooks with no visibly designed headings or structure and I as a human struggle to understand the intended structure of these books, then I have nothing from which my software/machine can learn. And therewith AI can’t reliably solve the structuring problem either. It may get it right by chance, but that doesn’t mean it can always structure every manuscript accurately. Human review is always necessary. The job of a software tool is to make that easy and painless, which is why I refer to Bookalope as an ‘AI-assisted tool’”.

Jens insists that “there is always a manual review process and no such thing as ‘full automation’ when we’re creating publishable books from mucky manuscripts or existing, old ebooks. There will always be a human element and that is a good thing. That is where my creative space opens up. I create the book design based on what the machine has cleaned up and structured for me; I haven’t wasted a week reviewing, correcting, and cleaning up the manuscript myself, rather I had the machine do it for me in just fifteen minutes.”

“Have you read The Rosie Project?” Jens asks. Mmm, no I haven’t, have you? Jens says that The Rosie Project was one of the best selling books in Australia in 2013. As someone who loves reading, I feel an interest in checking this out. I’ve looked this up and oh the cover is loud. Jens shares further “[…] the interior is uncomfortable to read, it looks like an ill-designed and carelessly printed Word document. Life is too short to buy an ugly book.”^‖

Then Jens continues, “I wonder if this is the best we can do? Do publishers really expect me to spend $35 on a book which, clearly, they’ve spent no effort on? I think we need tools that enable us to spend time on the book’s design, its presentation and content legibility, instead of wasting time and money being bogged down counting commas with no time left to create a beautiful book.”

A photograph of a path along green fields, lined by colorful autumn trees. — Simply moving forward on our chosen path. (Image by Hans from Pixabay).

From here to where?

So what’s next for Bookalope? Jens seems to collect his thoughts. “I really love working on Bookalope. I can solve interesting problems, explore different solutions, and flex my engineering muscles. I can create beautiful books in minutes, rich and accessible ebooks, print books, and more. It’s not perfect, but the perfect evolution of a tool that bridges software engineering and book design. We will continue improving and adding features in collaboration with our users, that’s for sure.

“Bookalope won’t make me rich, and that’s not the intention anyway. I don’t want to deal with the politics and other nonsense of the publishing industry. And yet, despite all the negative experiences we’ve had over the years we’re at a point where especially our accessible ebooks are amongst the cleanest ebooks out there, richest in semantic mark-up! We’ve built the only publishing tool that’s certified by Benetech, and that alone is very satisfying. We know that publishing workflows can be efficient and deliver high quality books at the same time, because we’ve built one!”

After a pause, Jens smiles and continues proudly, “Everybody should be able to access books and enjoy them, and with Bookalope we enable all readers — whether on a Kindle, an audio device, or a Braille reader — to read, and I think that’s the greatest reward of all!”

Indeed, what an admirable sentiment!

As for me, I’m glad I found Bookalope and can rest assured that my book is going to look great and work well, whether as a print book or an accessible ebook! Now I can go back to indulging in what I love doing most of all: writing in my van as the sun sets over the beaches of the Illawarra…

^* A brief history of Bookalope’s major milestones: after tinkering for two or three years we announced the public Beta in April 2015 () and launched the first publicly available version of Bookalope in August 2015 (); in May 2016 we announced the first iteration of our “AI” or, more correctly, the semantic structure classifier (); one year later in May 2017 we released and open-sourced the first Beta version of our extension for Adobe InDesign () which matured into an official release in August 2019; around that time we published our new website which also tracks regular news and updates; we introduced document views in July 2020 () and urchin link tracking in May 2021 (); then on Twosday 22/2/22 we released version 2 of Bookalope () with a new web interface and many new features; finally, all our efforts were rewarded when Bookalope became the first ever publishing tool to be certified by Benetech in October 2024 ().

^† You can read a somewhat friendly, somewhat sarcastic response to Adobe’s Suggestion on Sensei Powered Auto Style functionality discussion thread here.

^‡ In a recent conversation the following descriptions were shared: “No business person would go into publishing because publishing is not a business.” “Publishing is a lunatic asylum, they resist everything.” or “They're kindergardeners, they have no attention span.”

^§ Over the years we attended the following conferences: ECPA PubU 2018 and PePcon 2018, Independent Publishing Conference 2019, Digital Publishing Summit 2020, Assises du Livre Numérique 2021, Digital Publishing Summit 2025. In addition to these events we presented at various meetings and gatherings across the globe.