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sonicaa

13 karma · joined June 13, 2012

Java developer in the mind; tree-hugger at heart!
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sonicaa··on Why I’m Publishing My First Novel in a Format You’ve Never Heard Of
Chrome/OSX should work normally. I'm sorry about this. :-(

Can we look into the errors on your browser's console?

> zoom

Quick note: As a real reader will you prefer to pinchzoom on every page of the book or scale the book just once from the settings panel and be good to go?

> scroll

Scrolling is a no-go for books. My cofounder has written about this at length here: https://bubblin.io/concerns

---

We are aware about an issue that prevents us from using pinch features to scale content correctly on iOS Safari. The bug is raised with Apple for this and I'm hoping they'll catch up on it soon. :-)

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186970

sonicaa··on Why I’m Publishing My First Novel in a Format You’ve Never Heard Of
hi! Sonica, CTO of Bubblin Superbooks here!

> I've also run into instances where the preview has text cut off even at 100% zoom.

Which [device, os and browser] are you on?

> I'm reliant on them being always on and still around 10+ years later…

These books are hosted using a service-worker, and will work even if our service goes offline for sometime or your device disconnects from the Internet.

sonicaa··on Writing a Book with Unix
Have you seen https://bookiza.io?
sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
I've added Codepen's MIT License [0] to your name to credit you correctly at the right spot on our CSS. New build will be rolled out in a couple of hours so kindly check back again.

If however you're still uncomfortable about us using this experiment without a coffee, do let me know and we'll remove it from Bubblin completely. Just kidding, we'll sponsor you a coffee as well ;-)

[0] https://blog.codepen.io/legal/licensing/

sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
Thank you! I'm glad you like it. :-)
sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
> I also feel like picture/children ebooks books don't make much sense…

Have you seen this two books?:

https://bubblin.io/book/abcd-animal-book-by-judith-neumann/1

https://bubblin.io/book/ladakh-by-satie-sharma/1

I've personally read Judith's book on animated ABCs to toddlers in our community. In general, I'd want to optimize for attention span when it comes to kids--Bubblin helps with that. Most importantly, kids are already on the iPad, so it makes sense to go take it where they are.

Thank you for sharing the beeline technique. We can probably provide it as one of the layout template options! :-)

sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
Spritz won't work for books with illustrations. It's a complete no-go for photo-books and children's books, for example.
sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
We load the entire book in one shot and offline it immediately using a service-worker [0].

Feel free to test it! Bookmark the url and turn off the Internet. Now close the tab, hard refresh or restart your computer if you want to test that far. Reopen your browser and open the bookmarked url and the book will open up on the last page you were on and work normally with full UX/UI without Internet connection.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
> prefer my books as epub so they work nicely on my ereader. I also require that they be able to be downloaded as files

hi Sonica, CTO & cofounder here.

i'm sure there are a number of nuggets in the epub standard to pick up! it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file, navigate to the file on the disk and wait for it to open before they can start reading the book.

we do have a dry no-javascript no-frills mode for books on Bubblin right now, if that helps. we've written an essay [1] discussing some of these concerns and will be happy to engage/implement in a more accommodating fashion.

[1] https://bubblin.io/concerns

sonicaa··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
> I didn't even know it had any real social features.

hi, Sonica Arora, CTO of Bubblin here.

social is very critical to books, though I agree with you that with Bandcamp and in general with music it isn't so much. our store fees, transactions and writer-reader sale stuff and options will be just as transparent and simple as it is for Bandcamp.

thanks for sharing your views!

sonicaa··on Ask HN: Help me weave in STEM topics for a children's book
Have you seen this book of ABCs for babies by Judith Neumann?

https://bubblin.io/book/abcd-animal-book-by-judith-neumann/1

I thought it might be useful to consider animations over static artwork in some cases—especially for subjects that are hard to explain without visual explanations -- like a canvas experiment to explain pendulum motion. Or a gravitational slingshot or a chapter on optics and lensing.

sonicaa··on How to self-publish a book: A handy list of resources
hi, I'm Sonica, CTO and cofounder of Bubblin here.

Yes, the transition is shaky when the curl is near the horizontal axis. We'll fix or remove it on our next iteration of Bookiza.JS [1]

[1] https://bookiza.io

sonicaa··on How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017
This is very interesting. Does it use markdown as well or just plain markup/html in the manuscript?
sonicaa··on Show HN: My book on how to make a demo animation for your product.
Nice! It'd be nicer if the tutorial video of Adobe Flash is playable inside the book like other videos.
sonicaa··on My Teenage Son Does Not Know How To Mail A Letter
Kinda same here. My own handwriting is my favorite font.
sonicaa··on My Teenage Son Does Not Know How To Mail A Letter
> Good riddance.

Probably from cost perspective, but from emotional connect point of view it certainly is a loss[1][2].

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_brencher_love_letters_to_str...

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lakshmi_pratury_on_letter_writing.h...

sonicaa··on [dead]
Cool application! Here is something I would like to have - record a hand-drawn signature and use it on each of my letters. Something like the standard e-mail signature setting.
sonicaa··on Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine
> I didn't read this whole comment ...

It is unbelievable to me that PG did not read the whole comment. Nevertheless, this is not a good sign for tech start-ups.

sonicaa··on How to make a demo video for your startup
Explain Pythagoras theorem to a friend?
sonicaa··on Facebook To Let Advertisers Bid on Your Browser Data
On Firefox, Options > Privacy, check "Tell websites that I do not want to be tracked". Not sure if all websites respect this setting.
sonicaa··on Review my startup - http://palet.ly
There are so many online shopping websites today that I'm forced to ask what's your USP?
sonicaa··on Cool Letter Using HTML5, Javascript & CSS3
Can I get the link only to the document and not the site for sharing?
sonicaa··on Why Smart People Are Stupid
The last line "The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand." is worrying me a bit.
sonicaa··on Shown HN: Open Source Ticket Desk app
The app looks great. I wanted to point out the following (I might be missing something here) -- When I'm on the Customers tab, I see 0 open tickets for Alex B but when I click on Alex B and see his detailed page, I see 4 open tickets.