[sonicaa]

> prefer my books as epub so they work nicely on my ereader. I also require that they be able to be downloaded as files

hi Sonica, CTO & cofounder here.

i'm sure there are a number of nuggets in the epub standard to pick up! it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file, navigate to the file on the disk and wait for it to open before they can start reading the book.

we do have a dry no-javascript no-frills mode for books on Bubblin right now, if that helps. we've written an essay [1] discussing some of these concerns and will be happy to engage/implement in a more accommodating fashion.

[1] https://bubblin.io/concerns

[kungtotte]

Really? People who are about to spend a good amount of hours reading a book thinks it's a bother to wait two minutes for a file to download? Using any kind of modern system you'll have a standard download location and a "Open with..." dialog with the default app for a given file type selected, and most epub-capable apps will remember the recently used files so you don't have to.

This smells more like a "we don't want to" instead of "we can't"...

[icebraining]

Seem reasonable to me. Most people probably don't have an ebook reader installed, and would struggle to find one and install it. The site could point to one, but that essentially means they become responsible for supporting it.

Personally, I'd also prefer an epub, but I'm not the average user.

[deng]

The average user will use whatever Amazon, Apple, Kobo et al. provide. Just like the average user is happy with Spotify and iTunes and has never heard of Bandcamp. If something like Bubblin wants to succeed, it needs to cater to those users who are not happy with the status quo.

[ndnxhs]

The average user prefers something that works on an ereader.

[icebraining]

I don't think that's true, few people read ebooks in ereaders: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/pi_2...

[deng]

Maybe. But the people who have dedicated ereaders are usually those who read a lot and are passionate about quality ebooks. I'm sick of buying ebooks at Amazon, jumping through hoops only to get it onto my Kobo, and then find it has weird style sheets and plain wrong formatting, which I then have to fix via Calibre. This is just nuts. Combine this with the fact that only a tiny fraction of what I've paid went to the author, I would love if there was something like "Bandcamp for ebooks". I think this might very well work out, and I also think that many authors would jump onto this.

[magic_beans]

This is old data and I don't trust it.

[aflag]

Also, there could be one button to download the content and another to view it.

[darekkay]

> it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file

Except for all the people with an e-book reader. You're actively excluding power users. If it's really about the friction, just include an epub download as an alternative, so you address all target groups.

[all2]

> You're actively excluding power users.

The more I read of this thread, the more I think that's the point. They don't care so much about people with reading devices and are catering to a (they hope) mass-scale audience.

Rejection of the existing market might backfire, though.

[marvindanig]

> don't care so much about people with reading devices…

That's not true!

We support almost all devices on the planet that are on web, and would definitely like to reach devices that are not on web too.

What hadn't been clear to me up until yesterday was 'who we were': Netflix of books or Spotify of books or Bandcamp of books or Youtube of books, so I just went ahead with 'Bandcamp of books' for the announcement on HN.

I personally don't read books in form of files but that doesn't mean Bubblin wouldn't let authors or readers have it for their books -- unless of course we decide to become Spotify or Youtube of books instead.

Hope it clarifies.

[lstodd]

> it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file, navigate to the file on the disk and wait for it to open before they can start reading the book.

It's two touches on an android and under 20 seconds for a typical book on a good link.

What friction are you talking about?

Besides, fbreader eats so much less battery/ram/cpu than firefox. This is very important.

No epub/fb2 download - not interested at all.

[wishinghand]

> it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file, navigate to the file on the disk and wait for it to open before they can start reading the book.

That’s ridiculous considering how successful a lot of PDF releases are.

[japanuspus]

For all the kindle users, they could just supply their kindle email address and have you send the epub directly to the device.

[WorldMaker]

One of the reasons I've always liked Bandcamp as a consumer is that they made it simple for me to decide how I want consume the music. Maybe for this band I want to download a FLAC, and for this band I only care about an MP3. For less opinionated users they've long defaulted to MP3 which just about anyone can use.

You seem far too opinionated about your tech stack here to truly be a "Bandcamp" from the consumer side. You should try to meet customers where they are: if a user wants and asks for EPUB or MOBI (or MOBI with an AZW file extension) or CBZ or PDF or even DOCX for that matter, how good is your tech stack if you can't deliver on that choice?

A lot of people have favorite e-readers or e-reading apps, just because you offline-first HTML now doesn't mean it's necessarily the right fit. Especially in the world where users largely lost control of fonts and styling on the web, reader apps are people's best friends for long form reading.

It's technically neat that you plan to host arbitrary HTML to allow for interactivity in books. It's also an interesting security hurdle (your only plan to sandbox what you host is IFRAMEs?). But more importantly, if it gets in the way of being able to easily convert your hosted books to any e-reader format under the sun that a user may wish to pay for, is it doing you any good?

On the flipside you also don't seem to quite have nailed what made Bandcamp important to bands, either, which was its focus on bands. That early focus on bandname.bandcamp.com and being a "homepage" for a band listing their stuff alone without cross-sells, without being a "cluttered CD store", I think was critical to the early success of Bandcamp, and still a differentiator even as they've added a more somewhat unified catalog experience to the main page.

Where's your focus on authors? Again, your tech stack doesn't help here: a lot of writers use Word, your dripping disgust of Word in your FAQ shows that you don't seem to care about the tools that writers use. (A lot of professional writers use Word at least somewhere in their toolset because a lot of professional editors rely on the proofing and editing capabilities of Word.)

You have an ordinary bookstore homepage with an admixture of writers with no real organization and a focus on books over authors. You've already let it be a dumping ground of public domain authors, diluting any possible message that you are author-focused. Your author pages are okay, but they don't feel like a "homepage" for the user, partly because the URLs are ugly presumably SEO focused things (nickname-firstname-lastname; that's a lot of things), rather than author-focused personal brand choices. On top of that, your footer is a full third of the page of an Author with only a single book, making the page much more about you than them, and you've filled the page with your logos and your widgets such as login/signup, and including a floating "Need help?" button that also seems to be more about you than about the author, and another location for you to include your logo. Have you ever noticed how little Bandcamp brands itself on a band's page? The overall pixel count is pretty low, the number of widgets kept to a minimum (and pretty artist/album specific: buy, wishlist), used to be typically only a single tiny logo, and again the focus has always been on the artists.

If you are going to compare yourself to Bandcamp, it might be a good idea to get a better idea of what Bandcamp does right, and how they operate as a platform.

[marvindanig]

OP here. This is a very nice actionable feedback. Thank you for taking the time to write it!

My pinning to Bandcamp's business model was purely from royalty sharing/transparency standpoint. Clearly it isn't quite spot-on and causing some confusion in the community.

The broad footer on profile pages will progress downwards as the user builds more work on the top, but I will definitely rethink its colors to make it less conspicuous initially.

At this point we're almost like a manual sweatshop publisher and we get involved with the writers directly to adapt their book(s) on web. I don't think we'll be in a position where we'll do what thousands of other websites are already doing i.e. force people to download files (or skip) and hope that those files will be opened and read somewhere someday.

It doesn't help the cause of an ordinary user (following simple Priority of Constituents here) and the general idea is that if the book is not on web, it's not accessible by default.