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bookiza

What is Bookiza?​

Bookiza is an open source book writing framework that makes your life easy. Be up and running with a manuscript in seconds and publish some of the best most crazy beautiful books that ever existed.

Books baked with Bookiza use building-blocks of web i.e. HTML, CSS and JavaScript (Yeah, we got JS inside e-books!) so now you can spice up your story with underlying code, dynamic illustrations, data visualizations, interactive graphs, visual explanations and what not.

Get the whole web inside your book!

Check out our demo book on your iPad, for example.

Why a framework & not wordprocessor?​

We wanted to be able to write any kind of book — comics, scientific journals, magazines, novels, schoolbooks, textbooks - using the awesomeness of web.

Wordprocessors trump the flexibility that is required for books, comics & magazines that artists all over the world can create. That's not surprising because wordprocessors originally were meant for enterprise documentation (bureaucracy?) only. For things like purchase orders, contracts or legalese which has nothing to do with nice and creative books.

We also wanted books to feel native on the new web -- not like websites that pretend to be books. Be one that handles long form correctly and scales across all the devices and desktops out there, ala - responsive, adaptive and scalable (with or without touch capability).

🤘👉 A framework with a powerful CL interface also ensures that we can use our existing developer toolchain to mint and print books.

What it is not.​

:book: Bookiza is not yet another javascript framework (thankfully) for mobile or app development. It doesn't prescribed a pattern or emphasizes MVC or anything like that. Bookiza is also not a blogging solution. If you wish to write short-form essays or blogposts of upto 3-4 pages (or so) we recommend you to go for a blog instead.

At the moment bookiza will bake manuscripts that are at least 4 pages long. Read more about Superbooks on Bubblin.

Obsession​

Bookiza is obsessive about live book editions and quick manuscript turnarounds. Using instant edit2publish state of web to the maximum. Our goal is to optimize books on the web, make it friendlier for people to read, write and connect. Provide a flexibility that book writers haven't had for the last twenty years. A framework that decidely leaves behind the old-school idea of downloading-a-lifeless-artifact called ebook that is nothing but a dull file sponsored by an even older lobby group that wants physical books to thrive and remain on top!.

We want to focus on a future where web and books are unified, in a single resource that is both accessible and available everywhere.

Features​

  • Responsive container by default
  • Cover on all major devices and browsers
  • Support beautiful typography with @font-faces
  • Allow CDN resources for quick load
  • Open once, offline forever without needing to download any artifact
  • Modular pages that follow web standards
  • Visual explanations with in-page JavaScript
  • Full-bleed imagery for fashion/lifestyle journals
  • Support for WebGL, CSS3 or other HTML5 experiments.
  • Searchable & indexable content
  • Simplicity of git
  • Push2Deploy with real-time editions

The library​

Books created via Bookiza can be published directly to bubblin - our substrate marketplace for books or you can host the book on your own website too!

Find a selection of exclusive and handpicked books by our community of writers.

The community​

Authors​

Created & maintained by Marvin Danig.

Pull requests, issues, contribution and donations are very welcome. Feedback is welcome from both developers & designers!

See the list of contributors.

Further development​

Our motto: "Books should be a first class citizen of the web" -- let web & books be together, like a single unified resource -- both accessible and open!

We're also working on a draft proposal for spine_url to bring native support of books on the web -- like single page apps.

Dependencies​

async, superagent, progress, co-prompt, co, path, fs, chalk, commander, string, dateformat, shelljs, os-homedir