[IpxqwidxG]

Hello, Hacker News!

My name is Marvin (see: https://marvindanig.com/), and I just released the first version of Bubblin, my project for superbooks. https://bubbl.in/.

Bubblin is all about gorgeous e-books that are possible simply because of the web. You can use it like codepen (a code playground) to write the pages of your book, and publish it like a blog. It can be a lot of fun, I mean serious fun, to do stories/book via code.

For example, I wrote this ~full book on The Solar System:

https://bubbl.in/cover/the-solar-system-by-marvin-danig

... which was supposed to be a small demo initially. I'd initially planned for only 10-15 pages but I ended up writing the whole book instead!

All the code of this superbook is available on Github under MIT license if you want to play:

https://github.com/bubblin/The-Solar-System

Bubblin is pretty basic as of now, but it has a great feel to it. I expect the books to work silky on iPads/tablets but given it's a web approach support is sorta okayish on most platforms - mobile or desktop. I'm not too worried about it right now, but I would love some help/advise on making it omnipresent on any and every device in the world.

I hope you like the project. Good/bad whichever way, help me with your feedback and ideas please!

Yo! - M

Edits: Edited links, 'coz no markdown on HN :(

[vidarh]

> Bubblin is all about gorgeous e-books that are possible simply because of the web.

They're possible because of the web, but they're also unnecessary because of the web. To me, the reader presents as unnecessary annoying constraints that I'll tolerate if I'm e.g. reading PDFs that were actually formatted for a specific paper size (tolerate, not like), but which seems just silly when reading content that was clearly meant to be shown on screen.

Also: hate,hate,hate page-flip animations - either they slow down the page transition, or they're there to obscure a too-slow page transition; either way they get in the way of the experience very quickly.

Overall, on my desktop, it wastes too much screen space to margins and too large text (and another pet peeve: breaking text zoom is a big no-no; to zoom out it eventually work after zooming multiple levels, but of course then don't re-flow, but zooming in is basically broken). On my phone (which is my primary device for reading books) the experience feels excruciatingly slow thanks to the page flips.

It baffles me how many e-book readers are around, and how few even get close to getting even the fundamental stuff right. If you want to innovate in the e-book space: Make a reader that's faster and smoother than the Kindle app for the basics first, and then add features without at any point sacrificing things like zoom, fast page-flips, adjustable contrast and text-reflow.

[monsterix]

> Make a reader that's faster and smoother than the Kindle app...

Except that Kindle isn't any of those. Neither fast, nor smooth. But that's a kool-aid you've been drinking for too long. And even believe that books should not come on the web and have their own native experience.

> Also: hate,hate,hate page-flip animations - either they slow down the page transition, or they're there to obscure a too-slow page transition; either way they get in the way of the experience very quickly

It's all hatred and propaganda my friend.

Page-flips are an important experience of books, even iBooks has it! And I like it that way. I just checked on this one that transitions are close to 60fps. Agree with you on zoom-in part though, but then I'm reading it on my iPad so I don't need zooming so much.

> They're possible because of the web, but they're also unnecessary because of the web.

I'm afraid that is not your decision to make. It is absolutely necessary and does good for the children to move beyond stuck up books that are locked in time and technology of 15 years ago.

I wonder what do you have to say about that?

[vidarh]

> Except that Kindle isn't any of those. Neither fast, nor smooth

Maybe that's true on iOS. On my phone (Android), it's the only reader I've found that I consider tolerable for most uses. It's not by any means perfect, but of the dozens of alternatives I've tested, it's the one that annoys me the least.

> Page-flips are an important experience of books, even iBooks has it! And I like it that way.

You may think so, I don't, and I won't ever agree with you on that. For my part I simply don't use readers that force it on me. Either they have the option to disable it, or I won't use it.

> I'm afraid that is not your decision to make.

It's an opinion, not a decision.

> It is absolutely necessary and does good for the children to move beyond stuck up books that are locked in time and technology of 15 years ago.

I agree, which I why I find it annoying to deal with readers that insist on trying to mimic even older technology in all kinds of ways that introduce artificial restrictions on a medium that does not need them.

Case in point: It's simply not possible to offer proper zoom support without text-reflow, at which point the page-layout oriented UI falls apart.

[EliRivers]

Page-flips are an important experience of books, even

They are - the physical, tactile experience of it is a helpful part of the reading experience. It's not the visual image of a page being turned that's useful; it's the actual physical interaction of reader and book.

Non-physical books that simulate the 3D visual and physical experience with a hideous 2D visual only experience are hideous and intrusive and make the overall reading experience worse. Non-physical books shouldn't try to pretend they are what they're trying to replace; they end up just reminding the reader of what they're not, instead of impressing the reader with what they are. It's like advertising by drawing attention to features a product doesn't have.

Given that this product is meant to be taking advantage of all the things a physical book cannot, to clumsily ape physical books in this way is just silly.

[panglott]

I can't select/highlight text because it triggers the page-flip animation? Your analog metaphor is ruining my digital experience. It's putting flash before substance.

[cmews]

It looks great and I love the concept. Does it support epub format? If this is possible it is easy to write markdown on leanpub (export to epub format) and use bubbl.in for the perfect examples in javascript which would be a killer combination.

[armandososa]

Hi Marvin!

I used to work at a web reader platform and we found that this page flipping animations a) are very hard to do well, b) are bad for performance and c) people HATE them.

As you can see, people ignore everything else and just focus on how much they hate the page metaphor when in fact I think what you've done with the inline visualisations is pretty cool. So, I'd advise you to consider ditching it.

[panglott]

Thanks for this link. I really hate it when Web site splash screens fail/refuse to show you what they're about unless you sign up.

And sorry, but the page-flipping animation immediately puts me in a critical mood: it's not even subtle, it's a really over-the-top one. It blocks highlighting/selecting text, which negates the main value of reading electronic books: immediate access to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference sources.

I don't like the narrow, san-serif font. A good san-serif font can be quite clean and readable, but this one is too narrow IMO.

The drop cap words look terrible, typographically, misaligned and jarring. I don't understand why you're (inconsistently?) using drop cap words, initial drop caps, and paragraph headings without drop caps. The style is all over the place.

The animated illustrations are great! They add a ton of useful information to the text.

[IpxqwidxG]

> The animated illustrations are great! They add a ton of useful information to the text.

Thanks! I'm glad you liked those... :-)

I too prefer clean san-serif usually. For this one I chose a narrow @font-face to do some analysis. No worries it's just a demo book.

> Web site splash screens fail/refuse to show you what they're about unless you sign up.

It's not a splash screen. It's a plain home page with a direct link to the about page at the center. You don't have to sign_up to learn about us or me. In fact you don't even have to sign up to read the entire book there!

Here, let me relink it for you: https://bubbl.in/about

If it's a book then page flip is a must. There's is no escaping that. Else it's a slideshow. But I do know a lot of people who prefer slides/powerpoint presentations over books.

[bryanrasmussen]

Hi, I like it, but not so much in the browser - I am expecting you will be making some sort of library app or make it possible to export directly to iBooks / epub at some point? If so I think it's great in the browser then exists as a fallback / place to check out the book before you actually put it on your device. In the browser itself the whole book metaphor has always seemed cumbersome - is the code for that modular enough that it could be easily switched out with other interfaces? I am envisioning it as sort of theming the 'book'

[IpxqwidxG]

Native apps are planned. Here I answer some of these questions about us: https://bubbl.in/faq

I believe that it must be simple for the book writers to create, publish and sell. And probably have an extra legroom for creativity too -- using the power of the web and all that.

I have some rough ideas on where and how we'll proceed towards integration with other formats/platforms. But this is a fairly large undertaking, so I'm gonna need all the help and guidance we can get.

Note, Bubblin is FREE for the authors, a non-profit, so we need financial aid too. Read more about us here and donate if you like:

https://bubbl.in/foundation

[mdup]

Nice job! I like the idea and the implementation. A not-so-minor nitpick though: I have a decent recent laptop yet the Solar System book takes forever to load on Firefox (29s including 25s where the whole UI thread is blocked.) Maybe some kind of lazy loading would help?