The MemoryPress project I’ve been working on for about a year and a half now is finally ready for prime time! It’s purpose is to let you create a quality hard-bound book by collaborating with as many people as you would like. It’s ideal for a personal history, a wedding gift, or a 50th anniversary gift, for example. We’ve also rolled out a journaling app called Pyxlin with similar features.

One of the features that sets MemoryPress apart from other online book-making sites is that it actually uses a professional typesetting back-end (LaTeX) to create and typeset the book. The result is something that makes even amateur work look beautiful—text flows from page to page and around photos, with the correct proportions in the margins and distances between sections. On the back-end, we have a distributed Rails app on Amazon’s EC2 servers and some heavy javascript (yootools) on the front-end for the book editor.

Our goal at FamilyLearn is to create a searchable online database of your family’s memories in written, audio and video form. MemoryPress is the first product released to that end.