[boogdan]

I love it, however I have some suggestions:

1. Please, please use the metric system units or at least add both the imperial and the metric when you explain something. For example the Earth's rotation is in mph...you can at least say: 1000mph (1,674.4km/h).

2. On the Sun's chapter, you drew it yellow. Well, this is a common misconception, however the Sun is essentially all colors mixed together, which appear to our eyes as white.

3. There are too many links that forces the reader to constantly deviate from what he reads, thus killing the experience. You can come up with something similar to Apple's "look up" functionality [1]

4. No love for Pluto :(

[1]http://i.imgur.com/CWgjdCU.png

[bryanrasmussen]

You can fork the book on github, so you can make the changes and then send him a pull request :)

[jobigoud]

> 1000mph (1,674.4km/h)

Could we all agree to use a space (or nothing) as the separator for thousands? In French culture this is read as less than 2 km/h.

[Frozenlock]

Right:

"A space should be left between groups of 3 digits on either the right or left hand side of the decimal place (15 739.012 53). In four digit numbers the space may be omitted. Commas should not be used."

http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-conventi...

In addition, put the odd unit in parentheses, not the SI one.

> 1 674.4 km/h (1000 mph)

[unexpected]

I would expect a book written in French to follow French conventions, unfortunately, in English (American), a space would read as very confusing!

[germanier]

The space is actually recommended by international scientific convention (as it is the least confusing option) and also required if you follow the (American) AMA style.

[speps]

It's a next generation book, it should understand my locale and translate units automatically. How about that?

[IpxqwidxG]

Hey thanks for the awesome thoughts on the book!

> 1. Please, please use the metric system units ... 1000mph (1,674.4km/h).

Absolutely. Will do!

> On the Sun's chapter, you drew it yellow.

Oh yes, it's actually bright intolerable white once you're outside the atmosphere. I wrote this book for my nephew and he totally loves sitting next to me when we do these creatives. So I'm gonna leave it like that for now and revisit later in the day (it's 5:30 am here in DC!) with him.

> There are too many links that forces the reader to constantly deviate from what he reads ...

I realized it midway that traversal would be more-or-less linear and then reduced the number of anchor links per page later on. I guess I'm gonna leave it on the writers to choose what's best for their book. Will come back on the look_up feature later, but thanks for sharing your insight here.

4. No love for Pluto :(

There will be love for the dwarfs very soon! :-)

=====

Meanwhile, to those who are unhappy about the idea of having books with flipping animation on the browser, here's a little note: A lot of kids, especially my nephews, love it. It might be that you are not the right audience for it, but kids really love flipping the page as it is. And they love the animations and visuals within too. There's a reason why Apple chose to have flipping behavior for iBooks - cuz otherwise it'd feel more like a slideshow. Fast/performant is another thing, but books must have a bifolia experience that flips comfortably at a soft reading pace. There is no doubt about that.

While I understand the passion with which people want to impress what should or shouldn't be on the web, but there's no point making it a turf war. There have been several occasions where exactly the same thing - i.e. books - have been appreciated by hackernews on the browser itself. By the very same people who at other times chose to batter the idea.

For example, this book on Startup School Doodles from my friend Greg Koberger was loved invariably by all of you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449652

So it's all a matter of context and audience.

[vidarh]

> Fast/performant is another thing, but books must have a bifolia experience that flips comfortably at a soft reading pace. There is no doubt about that.

I don't doubt that some like it, and that it's an important option to have, but likewise it is important to offer the ability to turn it off, or you will lose people like me that will outright refuse to deal with your books if I have to suffer through page flipping animations. I've discarded dozens (and this is not an exaggeration) e-book readers over page-flipping behaviour, because when dealing with e-books, page flipping behaviour is one of the most noticeable UI behaviours.

I car about pretty much these things in an e-book reader: page-flipping behaviour, speed, text-zoom/reflow, ability to set contrast freely (including invert to light on black background), and well rendered/readable fonts. Everything else is secondary. Animations and interactivity can be fun, but a reader that fails on any of those items is a reader I'll never use.

[IpxqwidxG]

Great points!

A lot of experience of a book off bubblin depends on what code is written under it and how the author wants to present it. Inverting light/black, zoom, choosing fonts are all easy things to implement here, and those are some of the flexibilities the author has when choosing something for their book on bubblin.

Reflow is altogether another beast - I guess it is more useful for books with just plain text and images (lifeless). We're not focused on those type of books.

Also for some books reflow is simply a bad deal. For example the more technical ones suffer badly in the current fragmented ecosystem of book providers. I personally dislike it when our inability to scale fonts turns a 50 page book into a 100 page one for no fault of the writer or the reader.

There is much less control on the design aspect of content within a book and even lesser control on the size of the downloaded files there.

And btw, while we are at it, try the scaling potential of Viewport Width units for book. That does it here for my book!

[panglott]

Yea, the page-flipping behavior is my least favorite thing about iBooks vs. Kindle.

I wonder if there are really good technical reasons for it, or merely if iBooks was developed during the era when Apple still liked skeuomorphic designs.