Jason Fried@jasonfried
Good time to preview the next ONCE product. We're calling it Workbook.
You know, it's really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems.
But it's surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company's handbook can be a book. Or an actual book like Shape Up can be a book.
But usually you have to make a custom web site, or stretch to use a blog publishing tool to kinda-sorta squish separate posts together into a packaged whole. It's really not ideal. We know — we've published a variety of books online, and we've had to go the custom route each time.
Having to go the custom route for something that should be fundamentally simple is a red flag. And an opportunity. It really shouldn't be this hard.
So we're doing something about that. That's Workbook. It's a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in.
I'll be sharing much more about this soon, but here's a screenshot on the editing end. This is how you put a book together. Make the pages (there are three styles of pages available), drag them around to put them in the order you want, and Workbook takes care of the rest. A page can be a literal page of text, or an entire chapter — you can set it up however you'd like. Text editing happens in Markdown.
Once you're done, and ready to publish, you'd flip the toggle on the left under the cover, customize your URL (at your domain, of course), and the book is live on the web for the whole world to read.
Workbook will be a ONCE product, so you get all the code too. And for the first time, it'll be entirely free. You don't even have to pay once! You pay zero!
Workbook is our love letter to truly independent, zero-cost web publishing. We'll be republishing all our public books (Getting Real, Shape Up, The 37signals Employee Handbook, etc) using Workbook as well.
That's it for now, more soon.
