TLDR; Meet ✨Bubblin Superbooks–A modern book reader for web.✨
[…a huge yay!, a thousand 🎉🎉🎉s pop, and the 🍾🍾🍾 flows and a million 🎊 🎊 🎊 fall to the ground…]
Hello!
It feels awesome to finally be able to say this (after five years of wait):
We have a startup! 😇
Meet Bubblin Superbooks - a fun little project that my husband and I have built using Ruby on Rails, Postgres and JavaScript (Node). Bubblin is tablet first, so please pick up your iPad and flip open a book to start reading.
A little backstory. We always thought that if books are not files, why should e-books be?! To escape this notion of a file masquerading as an e-book (sic), we created Bubblin Superbooks and gave free and beautiful books a new home on web.
On Bubblin, you can heart books that you like or share them with your friends. Or you can simply hangout with other book lovers and be a part of a quiet, calm and level-headed community.
Since Bubblin is all about reading longform, we wanted the books to go offline-first. How couldn't we?!
We use a simple Service Worker instance under each book and introduce offline book reading on web, thus making it a very close to experience of reading real books offline. While Bubblin has been designed for a power tablet user on mind, it works just as good on desktops and mobile. It scales perfectly even on Apple Watch and an LCD TV.
Bubblin makes books enjoyable like never before, without ever needing us to leave the one place that we have come to love so much—the web! And, without felling a single happy tree! 🌱:)
For books we're relying on the awesome Gutenberg classics along with a few+new+titles contributed by the awesome community of writers. There's an OSS writer's tool in the works so hit me up if you wish it give its prerelease a go!
Now there's a lot going on with this little project of ours, and not everything is cool or even easy to reason about at the moment. But I'm sure that some of you’ll like it and share a word about us with your friends.
Good or bad, we are eager to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.
An alternate version of this article appeared on The Bubblin Blog.
Top comments (7)
heya peeps, I'm the other developer guy -- I do the frontend & chores! -- shout out to those interested in hacking books for a change!
Congrats on both!
Well done!
Yaay!
Bubblin brings life to books, online ;-) Kudos to you guys!
You just made books come alive!
Love seeing videos and moving images made a huge difference.
Thank you, I'm glad you like it!
Bringing animations alongside text for book reading is, I must confess, a very fine balancing act. It is easy to go overboard with animations and lose the reader's ability to focus on the story. We generally avoid animations inside a book unless it is very very relevant to the context: like showing how a pendulum works with an interactive visual experiment is great for teenagers on a physics book, but a bunch of birds flying across the page with literature underneath is not.
There's so much to dig for in the space of books!