Future of the book. Manifesto of Bureau Gorbunov Publishing

We don’t want to make websites instead of books. To understand what a digital book should be, it’s worth trying to perceive it as an information format, not a physical medium.

Paper books and Epubs are made by “publish and forget” principle, while web books, figuratively speaking, consume electricity on the server, even when nobody reads them. Of course, there is an advantage: a web book can be fixed, updated, supplemented. But if paper book can lie in the attic for several centuries and be read at any time, web book sho... See more

Book is a sequence of spreadsIn a paper book, a unit of meaning is a spread, and it is absolutely irreplaceable. A spread is a specific place that you can easily remember, find and refer to in a conversation: “read the page about the Museum.”

The book is a single object⁠—in a single window: t he reader should continuously and freely move back and forth through the text. Chapters should not be separated from each other by hyperlinks or other artificial barriers.

The book is not designed for reading at a single sitting, but for several days or weeks. Therefore, the book should have a structure, reference tools and some mechanisms for gradual assimilation and learning.

Typical web document: Texts of documents and posts are not necessarily linear: they can be split into sections or structured by columns, color areas and sidebars.

Why not just publish paper books? If we decided to publish paper books, we would have to: find money, set up logistics, and accept the loss of connection with the book.

Book is a format of different level that is good for presenting a whole system of knowledge.

That’s how we came to the idea of subscription to interactive books.

To read Apple books, you need an Apple device, and not everyone has one. But shouldn’t the book be the most accessible and durable medium of all?