Apply for community grant: Company project (gpu)
Project Title
Obsidian Chat & Book Maker: Democratizing AI-Powered Publishing
Project Summary
Obsidian Chat & Book Maker is an open-source, web-deployed toolkit that lets anyone—from individual creators to community organizations—rapidly author, assemble, and publish fully-formatted PDF books using state-of-the-art conversational AI. Powered by a large language model (Qwen1.5-14B) running in a Gradio interface on Hugging Face Spaces, the system offers two core modes:
1. Chat Interface
• A friendly “Obsidian” assistant for brainstorming, drafting, and iterative editing
• Persistent history so users can build on prior conversations
2. Book Generator
• Automatically stitches together front matter, 25 chapters, and back matter to create a 300-page book (55,000 words) on any theme
• Customizable section-by-section word targets and styling
• One-click PDF output via WeasyPrint for print-ready layouts
Objectives and Community Impact
• Lower the barrier to long-form publishing for under-resourced writers, nonprofits, and grassroots educators.
• Foster storytelling by providing an AI “co-author” that can help structure ideas, flesh out narratives, and polish prose.
• Enable rapid iteration: What once took months of writing and layout can now be prototyped in hours, accelerating community-led publications (e.g., local history anthologies, training manuals, grant reports).
• Open-source and extensible: All code is MIT-licensed and hosted on GitHub (obsidianai-tech/obsidian-chat-book-maker), inviting contributions, localization, and custom integrations (new models, themes, export formats).
Technical Approach & Sustainability
• Scalable deployment on Hugging Face Spaces with token-authenticated access—no specialized hardware required beyond a modern GPU.
• Modular design: Easy to swap in fine-tuned models or add new “section blueprints” (e.g., poetry collections, technical handbooks).
• Community support: We’ll host workshops, publish tutorials, and seed a “book-maker fellowship” to mentor community leaders in using and extending the tool.
• Long-term roadmap: Crowd-sourced style templates, multilingual support, and integration with print-on-demand services to turn community projects into real, physical books.
Requested Grant Activities
• Compute & hosting credits to keep the demo live and responsive for up to 1,000 monthly users.
• Documentation & training materials—professional video tutorials, translated guides, and sample templates.
• Community outreach: Funds for local meetups, hack-a-thons, and stipends for “book-maker fellows” who will document diverse use-cases.