The State of Markdown Book Publishing in 2026: What Changed and What's Next

The GitBook Inflection Point For years, GitBook was the default answer to "how do technical authors publish Markdown books." The original open-source tool was simple, well-documented, and widely adopted. Then GitBook pivoted to a commercial SaaS platform, introduced aggressive pricing tiers ( 65 – 65– 249/month), dropped self-hosting, and added AI-native features like GitBook Agent and AI Answers…