The Superbook Format
Superbook is a native book format for the web. It was designed, implemented, and being maintained by Marvin Danig.
Definition
Superbook stands for superclass of an object like book.
It is an empty container for any kind of long-form: books, novels, comics, magazine or anything that needs multi-page storytelling. You can also publish ergonomic greeting cards like this one if you want. Superbooks are ordinary websites that work offline via a modern web browser using a service-worker, i.e. a standard PWA—and this means that you can take advantage of open web on your books, collaborate, edit, update, publish, share and republish a live book any number of times.
In fact readers can talk about your book on each page of the story separately!
Why Superbooks?
Web has been generally bad at long-form. Handling a large corpus of text has not only been traditionally difficult (from the beginning of web/time?) but nigh impossible to relax with and enjoy as a reader. As compared to say a physical book, a digital file leaves a lot to ask for and frankly books are not files to begin with! It is no wonder that most people including the developers themselves prefer buying a physical copy even for subjects like CSS, or Rust or JavaScript where tech moves faster than print could ever be rolled out.
Apart from issues of inaccessibility of the inner pages of book (or of content deep down on a long infinite scroll), the scourge of propreitary file formats that are generally incompatible with each other along with a loose reflowable layout makes it hard — nearly impossible — for even the most ardent book fans to be on the same page.
With Superbooks people can finally enjoy long-form online the way they do with a physical book. It brings tight scalable and responsive formatting using strong layouts and a high quality finish that sports even page-level referenceability. Unlike an enterprise-y file (like PDF or Epub) that people are forced to download a Superbooks is simply a website with the native experience of books. Superbook format is a live specification. All feedback and inputs are welcomed on forum to make it as robust and accessisble as possible.
Wish to learn how it all works? Start with a chapter on the underlying [concept]( site.baseurl post_url 2018-01-01-concept %).