Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Dreams of the perfect habitat

The product I've always dreamed on realizing came true thanks to Inkling Habitat.
And you still don't know the best part: they are also making it public!

Habitat is a digital publishing platform based on standards and hosted on the cloud.
Starting Tuesday (today n.d.r) they are releasing it for public access.
They are proposing legacy contents import, the possibility of a full Google indexing of the books created with their platform, the ability to export as EPUB and a bunch of big names of the industry as their partners (O'Reilly, Pearson, Time Inc. and Lonely Planet, just to name a few).

I'm both sad and happy about it: sad because I was starting to design a similar solution; happy because now I know I took the right path in designing it. It's the path of open-standards and the path of the better web.


It's like Inkling is really creating a completely new habitat for digital publishing, by simply using the foundations of the World Wide Web (HTML and its complimentary technologies) and finally detaching the digital publishing from the old, paper-based, publishing industry (that's still only able to mimic the paper magazines on an electronic device and propose them as "the future").

Well, Inkling, with Habitat, built that digital publishing of the future and they did it powerful, standards-based, open and beautiful.

They didn't kill paper. They simply extended it until it reached the web and the mobile world.