I’m writing a book and my editor needs to be able to alter/comment on the document as we go. I’m afraid AI is gonna use my work so I wanna move away from Google.
i see many comments here suggesting other paid proprietary tools and just want to add that you should please consider exclusively FOSS solutions. replacing google with another company saying: “trust me, bro”, just does not cut it anymore. the internet is filled with stories of professionals losing work, because insert big tech company suspended their accounts, trains their AI without disclosure or just leaked your credentials and apologizes by makung a whoopsie post and suggesting you just change your password.
the more open, local and established your setup is, the less you are going to have those headaches and can focus on actually working, even if it means a little more hurdles with setup and less flashy features.
don’t be a sheep
Depending on the nature of your needs wrt version control, and how you want your editor to provide annotations, that will shape what solutions work for you. Those are pretty important considerations you will probably want to clarify, to get good advice. Also your comfort with self-hosting.
I’ve personally switched to silverbullet. It offers some really cool features, but I don’t think it’s going to provide the things you want in a way I suspect you’d like.
For example, annotations would be directly inline, not in a little sidebar. And there is no versioning to tell you who made what edit, when; you have to self host it, and provide your own backups at whatever schedule you want, separately from the app. And the really cool features probably aren’t going to be useful for the manuscript itself, it’s things like smart linking to sections of pages, and the ability to embed search queries of your docs directly in a page.Obsidian/any competent editor + sync thing + backup.
I haven’t had any issues with this setup. The syncing is almost instant.
https://etherpad.org/ lets you set up your own instance or sign up to free existing instances for online document collaboration. It seems very on par with Google Docs.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ has wide document format compatibility and is most comparable to M$ 360, but you need to sign up for a free demo and I don’t know how long that lasts or what it costs afterwards.
https://cryptpad.fr/ This is the one I’ve personally used the most without ever creating an account. It uses OnlyOffice, is e2ee, easy to create and share. Without an account, your document is deleted after 90 days. With a free account, you get 1GB of storage and the ability to share folders and collaborate with other users.
The safest option is always just work in the offline editor of your choice and send it back and forth securely with edits or comments. Keep each revision saved separately so you can go back if needed.
Good luck with your book!
FYI, OnlyOffice is entirely Russian-owned, through a holding company in Singapore and a subsidiary in Latvia. I don’t know if money you give CryptPad ends up in Russian hands, but OnlyOffice put a lot of effort into obscuring this.
I’m afraid AI is gonna use my work so I wanna move away from Google.
That is a completely valid fear, from what I understand of how Google operates.
I no longer trust Google with anything.
Proton is probably the easiest—their free tier might even be enough for your use case.
cryptpad All your docs are stored encrypted, so no AI can be trained on.
I’ll def post about it once it’s done! Rn only my inner circle of irl buddies and my editor are reading it.
Proton for a “drop in” kind of replacement, although there are some format shenanigans iirc. Nextcloud should work fine, and you can have it hosted on their servers or host yourself
Is there a personal Nextcloud option? It looks like it’s all for official businesses
You have to host it yourself, pay for it to be hosted for you, or know and trust someone with an instance who is willing to give you an account.
Nextcloud is like Lemmy. Nextcloud is just the software, to use it you need a service provider that’ll give you an actual instance to sign up on. That provider can be anyone, including yourself.
Nextcloud makes free personal accounts available via a couple partners, here: https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/
Ah. Yeah that’s not a feasible thing for us unfortunately. My editor is part of a small startup publishing company, so their revenue is pretty much non-existent right now.
I edited my comment.
But if a couple gigs of storage will do, there is this: https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/
It’s the same thing, you can host it yourself or let someone host it for you. But you’re right with your feeling that they don’t really prioritize a slim profile for selfhosters with this system. I had to give it up and move to some more lightweight alternatives for those parts I’m using.
I see many great suggestions here so I am only gonna add one thing to them: consider self hosting if you care about privacy and owning your own work. Something like nextcloud has all of the features of google drive/docs built in and much more and these days really isn’t that hard to expensive to setup.
Dropbox?
Idk how I didn’t think of that, my goodness
I’d carefully review policies of Dropbox or any company to make sure you aren’t just jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. If I was you I’d look into one of the encrypted services others have mentioned. Or even just email an encrypted PDF to them on the regular.
I’m going to review my options EXTENSIVELY. My book is the best thing I’ve ever written and my beta readers are already fans of it and I’m only 3 chapters in.
This sounds really exciting. Can’t wait to hear more about your book.
Thank you! I plan to share it here on Lemmy once I get published. I’m having so much fun with it. It’s SUPER different than my usual writing an it is honestly a blast
Now I want to read the book!
Paid versions of m365 keeps you in control of your work product.
you mean the one with AI baked into its core? the one from a company that does not respect yours or anyone elses privacy what so ever? yeah iam sure they will make sure they dont steal op’s work :D
Yes. They do not mess around with enterprise customers. If they started training on paying customers client data they would 1) lose a significant amount of customers and 2) expose themselves to millions of lawsuits.
I don’t think you understand how closed source software works. What you just said is exactly true with the only lie being that they get caught. There is no way to prove that they are doing this and that’s exactly why I’m sure that they are…
Besides, openai and many others have violated the copyright laws many times and faced no real consequences, do you really think this legal system is on your side?
Corporate entities are in control. They wouldn’t stand for it.
MS has been very aware of how ai-adverse corp has been. They’ve had to write out policy specifically for ai-use even though their existing policy covered it. Corp lawyers have scrutinized this ad nauseam.
This isn’t a closed source issue. It’s a legal issue that would end MS’s existence if it were violated. MS doesn’t make money off of selling windows licenses. It’s m365.
You are still missing the point, yes that would be all true but only if you can prove that they are violating anything… Which you can’t since it is closed sourced.
Microsoft as every company like this makes money from selling your data and manipulating you.
Ai would be regurgitating data that it shouldn’t have access to outside of your tenant. That isn’t happening. That’s how you know.
Corporate entities are in control of the copyrights of a lot of the training materials used to train ai, too.
