Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books

I couldn&#x27;t find any info on your page regarding the royalties model that you&#x27;re going to use. How much of a cut are you going to take? Is it going to be closer to amazon&#x27;s 70% or closer to bandcamp&#x27;s 15%?<p>Why do you have the restriction to original work and public domain work &quot;with your own take&quot;? For me, personally, that&#x27;s a bit disappointing, since I work largely on digital reproductions of public domain work leaving it &quot;as is&quot;.<p>One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. It&#x27;s a lot of work. I sometimes have to find multiple originals in libraries and antiquarian bookstores if there isn&#x27;t a single original available in a good enough condition. Then I type them in multiple times to make sure there are no typos. I scan &amp; vectorize the graphics. Then I produce nice reflowable EPUBs and ensure compatibility with a wide range of hardware. That kind of thing is hard work, and yet that sort of work is probably not protectable by copyright. It&#x27;s been a personal frustration of mine that platforms for bookselling are often so uninviting towards that kind of content. -- It would be pretty easy for me to take a work like that and make it into an edition &quot;with commentary&quot;, but, honestly, I&#x27;d much rather allow these works to shine in their original glory.

From a user&#x27;s perspective: The main point of Bandcamp is that you actually own what you buy. No DRM, no additional charge for lossless, properly tagged, including cover art, everything in a perfectly normal ZIP anybody can use and nobody can take away from you again. That is why Bandcamp was so refreshing when it started, and that is why I buy my music there whenever possible. As far as I can see, this site is nothing like that.

I read all the time on my iPad. Sorry for the negative feedback, but I don’t think I would use this. If there’s no pdf&#x2F;ePub download that I can put into a reader of my choice, see alongside my other downloaded books, take anywhere with me, categorise, highlight, bookmark, skip around in, etc, then it’s not for me, and it’s not like Bandcamp. On the iPad there is no friction with downloading such files to a reader app - it’s one or two clicks - so I’m not sure why that is the reason given for no providing it.<p>Also, the font is simply gigantic, I felt like I was back in primary school! I couldn’t discover how to resize it, if that is possible.

I am a huge fan of bandcamp, I buy most of my music because I can download the FLAC files and put them on my streaming server. I was rather disappointed that instead of providing polished, DRM free ebook files but went with a web based version that I cannot transfer to my ebook reader.<p>I would be more than happy to not only pay the authors but also for the work that you guys do by providing nice clean files.<p>There is another small thing that bugs me. Why did you choose to emulate books in your reader even down to turning pages? IMHO this is rather unnecessary, just presenting the book like a long article with well done typography would have been enough. (the reason, again IMHO, that ebook readers have virtual pages is that their displays are to slow to have smooth scroll)

The entire point of bandcamp, for me, is FLAC downloads.<p>There was already a comment about how there aren&#x27;t epub downloads. So this is hardly the &quot;Bandcamp for books.&quot; More like the &quot;Spotify for books&quot; I would think.

Had a read of the FAQ and it doesn&#x27;t seem like its for me. I prefer my books as epub so they work nicely on my ereader. I also require that they be able to be downloaded as files so I can store them on my hdd and they are safely archived so if the original seller pulls them offline or the website shuts down I will always have access to them.<p>This services feels more like a longer form blog platform tbh but good luck and I hope others find use in it.

&gt; Welcome to Bandcamp of books, comics and magazines!<p>I&#x27;d be wary of using that phrase directly on your home page. That&#x27;s definitely making use a of trademark you don&#x27;t own - seems like a quick path to some legal trouble with bandcamp?

Looks nice :-) What are you planning for the future? I&#x27;d like to take a lot of notes and get a nice overview for future review &#x2F; a lot of learning features.<p>Any thoughts on adding discussions?<p>I&#x27;d also like you to add a lot of essays ;-)<p>Bug report: I verified my email, but it still tells me to do so. (Using on Macbook, validated from iPhone, so different device)

It all looks really cool but can you please clarify 1) licensing -- all your git projects say &quot;license TBD&quot; for many months. 2) clarify the selling options - 3) If I want to publish a book on my own site, why do I need to authenticate to bubblin.io 4) what is your accessibility story?

I love the ES6 book, crisp and clear<p>The ui seems considered and polished, works good on mobile for me

Quick UI&#x2F;UX note: You should remove the border around the titles until you hover over them, way more pleasing on the eye and less &quot;in your face&quot;!

I&#x27;m glad to see you&#x27;re using my code for the book hover states: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;rafaelrinaldi&#x2F;pen&#x2F;LEYyKZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;rafaelrinaldi&#x2F;pen&#x2F;LEYyKZ</a><p>If possible can you just mention it somewhere, or just buy me a coffee instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buymeacoff.ee&#x2F;rinaldi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buymeacoff.ee&#x2F;rinaldi</a>

How do I find any new books there? I don&#x27;t mind the classics yet I feel curious about what do indie writers write today.

What does &quot;bandcamp&quot; refer to? Is that another webapp or are you comparing the bookreader to a summer camp?

Interesting that they go whole hog with the tournament model where everything is based on the hustle and luck.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.demontfortliterature.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.demontfortliterature.com&#x2F;</a> takes the opposing approach where they hire authors for a stable salary.

Explain to the folks at home what Bandcamp is

How can one go about authoring a book on your platform? It&#x27;s not the same old EPUB, is it?

Hi HN!<p>Meet Bubblin Superbooks, a social book reader for web. It&#x27;s _iPad first_ and all the books (mostly public domain samples) work offline too using a service worker.<p>Hope you like it! :-)<p>Good&#x2F;bad, all feedback is very welcome!

I love your website by the way. If I want to read 1984 on EPUB I will just download it from Guttenberg or something but if I am reading it in browser I will certainly use your service. I really don&#x27;t know what all that negative feedback is about. Of course, that doesn&#x27;t mean we should turn into a producthunt-like shilling party with fake positive comments, you guys need to criticize without passing negative feelings to the authors. It&#x27;s really depressing to work months on something and then when you show it to people they start complaining about things that aren&#x27;t in your product&#x27;s scope in the first place.