I think Leanpub has a ways to go before it can be useful for academic writing in my field (mathematics and theoretical computer science).<p>My personal experience: I&#x27;ve tried using Leanpub and found issues with the way it handles mathematics. For example, the last time I checked (maybe around June) the TeX support in their Markdown was not developed enough to handle aligned equations, which is a big sticking point for me and I think for most mathematicians.<p>The standard process for academic writers is to typeset an entire book themselves in LaTeX regardless of the publisher (they tend not to publish-as-they-write, though that could conceivably change). Leanpub is unlikely to convince book authors in math by forcing them to convert to Markdown, especially for book writing when cross-chapter labels for theorems and exercises are common. If Leanpub wants to attract academic writers in math they need a sturdy tool that converts a LaTeX book to the Markdown flavor that Leanpub needs. But that&#x27;s a crap-ton of work (especially considering third-party libraries like tikz) with an unclear contribution to Leanpub&#x27;s bottom line.<p>Of course, the alternative is to post only a pdf format, but that kind of defeats the point of Leanpub which is that they generate multiple formats. A service like gumroad would be cheaper per transaction.