Is there any self hosted software available where you could write a book in a blog format? The writer would write the chapters as individual blog items and the home page would be a table of contents linking to all the chapters/blog items. The writer could also export the blook to PDF, epub etc. I think something like this would make it really easy for a writer to get started and build an audience over time.
Imperfect solution, but MediaWiki (<a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mediawiki.org/</a>) comes to mind. Wikibooks (<a href="http://www.wikibooks.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikibooks.org/</a>) is using it fairly successfully.
shameless plug : I've been working on a document management system with an epub content type for some time and I'm releasing this quarter, follow me @keefe and check it out...<p>generally though, if you want to use something yourself you can use an arbitrary content management system like drupal, verify it has an output to txt and then look into epub builders, epub is a relatively simple format.