An Overview of Ketty

Ketty is a modern book production system. It enables authoring, collaboration, proofing, copy editing, styling, formatting, reviews, automated typesetting, and multi-format export—all within a web browser.

P.S. Just a small update for clarity: we’ve embraced ‘Ketty’—a friendly nickname our Coko team has always used for the platform. This shift comes after hearing that the original name ‘Ketida’ posed pronunciation challenges for some in our community. Feel free to use either ‘Ketty’ or ‘Ketida’; we’ll know exactly what you mean!

Why use Ketty?

Collaboration is integral to publishing. Authors, researchers, editors, proofreaders, designers, typesetters and production staff all work together to deliver content to the world. Unfortunately, legacy publishing workflows constrain collaboration with linear workflows, each stage of the publishing process is gate-kept by whomever is actively working on the documents at that time.

The web offers a unique opportunity for collaboration to take place concurrently, eliminating gate-keeping and consequent waiting times, miscommunications, and versioning issues. If everything that needs to happen to the content happens online all the way through to delivery, then individual tasks can be done quicker, and the entire process becomes lighter to manage. What this means practically is that each team member can do what they need to do when they need to do it.

To create this vision of optimized collaboration in publishing, there are three issues to solve: getting content into the web, editing content on the web, and getting content out of the web (into print-ready and digital formats). In other words, we have to solve everything. Attempts have been made to solve these issues before but they haven’t been solved in a way that satisfies publishers.

Enter Ketty. Ketty is designed by publishers for publishers (and self-publishers) to meet their needs.

Consequently, Ketty offers independence from expensive, upgrade-driven systems. You can, for example, do away with Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign’s costly licenses, and the need to update InDesign templates and custom-made MS Word macros. You no longer need to preserve that one ancient computer in your organisation that runs the right version of MS Word for the job at hand! No longer do you need to rely on external designers. You can do it all yourself, or in collaboration with a larger team.

Ketty is built to help Publishers both large and small.

Ketty is continously evolving

Our team is actively expanding the features available in Ketty. Keep up-to-date by joining the Ketty Forum, reviewing our roadmap and getting in touch via the Ketty mattemost channel or by email at ketty@coko.foundation.