I love it, however I have some suggestions:<p>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).<p>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.<p>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]<p>4. No love for Pluto :(<p>[1]<a href="http://i.imgur.com/CWgjdCU.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/CWgjdCU.png</a>
First, I love the concept. I've often been reading interesting books and wished I could dynamically jump through them. I've even wanted to do this in fiction -- for example, if characters reference something I forgot about, I wish I could just click that and go back to that original chapter/scene and refresh my memory.<p>I suspect that any UI awkwardness will be growing pains caused by it being a new idea for books.<p>Technical Issue<p>1. I click a planet expecting to go to a chapter about that planet (say, Saturn), but nothing happens despite the page reloading and the address bar changing to #saturn. Chrome 43 on OS X 10.10.<p>Content Issues<p>1. I love the animated cover, but it wish it had relatively accurate orbits and periods (within reason). One of the coolest things for me as a kid was realizing that Pluto and Neptune switch places.<p>2. The summary for the book says "all ages," but very shortly in you have a bunch of math and symbols that don't make sense unless you've already had geometry.<p>3. The homepage presents Bubblin as "for developers," which doesn't seem to fit. Do you want authors to present books (as suggested by your own), or do you want developers to use it to present stuff (documentation, use cases, white papers?) about development? It's also at odds with your statement "Meanwhile, to those who are unhappy about the idea of having books with flipping animation on the browser, here's a little tip: A lot of kids, especially my nephews, love it," so I feel like there's a little bit of confusion about the audience. :)<p>A nice idea/platform! I just wish I had something to use it for.
I thought the solar system book was incredible and I am going to talk to my wife about using it as a home school resource. I would definitely love to see more materials show up that are like this. It would be great to have some options for turning things on and off, like page flipping, removing some of the higher level math as it might throw off younger students, and it would be great to have a lock-in mode.<p>The lock-in mode would be a parental control that keeps a child from going to other sites, so that I could set my kid loose on a book and know they aren't playing video games.<p>While I acknowledge that other platforms make e-books and interactive books, I love that you are making a centralized location on the web for the creation and curation of these resources.
Fantastic stuff! Truly novel reading experience.<p>The biggest challenge for you to build tools around this. Expecting writers to know basic web development is a huge ask. You need a tool like Adobe Indesign [1] or Amazon's Kindle book publishing tools[2].
The second challenge is to go cross platform/device. The biggest challenge here, to reduce the size of the entire artifact book and not just rendering speed/quality.<p>[1]<a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/publishing-for-everyone/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/publishing-for-everyone...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A3IWA2TQYMZ5J6" rel="nofollow">https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A3IWA2TQYMZ5J6</a>
Very cool!<p>On page 17 of the Solar System book I want to rotate the globe but can't manage to do that without also initiating a page flip, which is pretty annoying.<p>Also, the formula rendering on page 21 is not quite right (Firefox).
From the contents page, if i click on say page 22, it opens in a new tab and pops up saying 'you left off on page 13', then has the options to go back to page 13 or the beginning.
It isn't obvious that to actually get to 22 I need to close that window, and im not sure why it has to open a new tab rather than just go to that page?
I wish there was a light markup language for this kind of work. Something like: markdown + a less verbose SVG for static illustrations + elm for the interactive part
I don't really get it. This is an interface inside an interface with its own custom behaviors and just a few pages in I get to the TOC, click a page and I'm presented with a popup that tries its best to confuse me. Yes, the animations are cute and stuff, but really: why do I want another reader-within-the-browser book reader? There's already good reason I don't use the ones that came before it.
Forcing me to click around 3+ times to even find out what this is about makes me regret clicking on the link. I suspect if I were the average user I would have clicked back on the landing page.
Hello, Hacker News!<p>My name is Marvin (see: <a href="https://marvindanig.com/" rel="nofollow">https://marvindanig.com/</a>), and I just released the first version of Bubblin, my project for superbooks. <a href="https://bubbl.in/" rel="nofollow">https://bubbl.in/</a>.<p>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 <i>serious</i> fun, to do stories/book via code.<p>For example, I wrote this ~full book on The Solar System:<p><a href="https://bubbl.in/cover/the-solar-system-by-marvin-danig" rel="nofollow">https://bubbl.in/cover/the-solar-system-by-marvin-danig</a><p>... 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!<p>All the code of this superbook is available on Github under MIT license if you want to play:<p><a href="https://github.com/bubblin/The-Solar-System" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bubblin/The-Solar-System</a><p>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 <i>okayish</i> 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.<p>I hope you like the project. Good/bad whichever way, help me with your feedback and ideas please!<p>Yo! - M<p>Edits: Edited links, 'coz no markdown on HN :(