I actually did not know this until this comment.

mdbook was originally created because we liked the UX of gitbook, but didn't want to introduce a Node dependency into building Rust.

That would certainly be useful information to provide in the readme. I'd never heard of gitbook or mdbook before this.

And, annoyingly, a lot of google searches for "gitbook xyz" just turn up the new cloud-hosted gitbook subscription service. You have to go through archive.org or similar to read the documentation for the original.

I just started using GitBook for a blog because it is opensource and offers a free hosted site.

As I understand it only the CLI portion is unmaintained[0] which aligns with how it's being used by the developers (and me). [Btw, the older version is easily found as GitBook legacy.]

[0] https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook#%EF%B8%8F-deprecation-w...