gitbooks cli is unsupported and falling apart at the seams honkit is a maintained fork which works out of the box https://github.com/honkit/honkit
just npm install and you will have all the plugins loaded and npx honkit serve will give you a local preview
You need node, gitbook-cli, and this repo
npm install -g gitbook-cli
git clone THIS_REPO
cd THIS_REPO
gitbook install
gitbook serve
Note: you might need to wait a moment for for the compiling to complete - you'll see a message about where the book is being served.
Run gitbook help to see different build options