Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes and textbook platform

I use offline storage to sync books and make them available to read offline.

You are right that the back button behavior is a little weird. I completely missed this during my tests. Shame on me. The use of the history API was meant to allow people to bookmark places within books not to make "back" act all weird. I will have to reconsider how I do this.

Thanks for the feedback :-)

(1) the core functionality already exists in the form of the hyperlink. HTML lets you easily reference external materials as well as handle inline footnotes. It is relatively easy to port existing content to HTML and vice-versa and mix-and-match reference styles. And people can dive into subjects in as much depth as they want on existing sites (look at Wikipedia). There are WYSIWYG editors. And content is portable. So why switch?

(2) if I care enough to write a book, I care about making it look good. The website does not look as good as a default blog, and the added functionality is intrusive and ugly. For one example, look at the way the down arrows occupy an entire vertical row, distorting the spacing of the text. The HTML design looks like it is using 1990s display defaults (no floats, no inlining), even though it is clearly more sophisticated once you check the source.

(3) teachers and educators very rarely put effort into creating content for institutional educational when it doesn't play into a larger project or effort initiated or supported by a school/grant. This might be a controversial statement, but which school started Wikipedia? Which school started the Khan Academy? Look at the limited number of open source textbooks almost twenty years after the web began making inroads and you can see your market does not really exist. Teachers will experiment with mass market platforms (like blogs, twitter) which have social reverb and cachet. They don't get institutional support for writing open source stuff on the web so there is more focus on fulfilling individual classroom needs than writing more general textbooks.

(4) compared to HTML, it's cognitively more difficult to have to always be thinking about what sort of stuff to leave out or minimize. Someone writing a textbook is already applying selection criteria. You are asking them to cognitively handle presentation-level data as well. This puts a higher bar on getting useful content even if someone starts writing.

(5) the triangles are too big and are on the right-hand side. The default is smaller triangles to the left which point to the left when closed and point down when open.

(6) "Bookvoid" is a problem. Even if someone out there hypothetically wants this, what keywords are going to bring them to your site and what metaphor will you use to explain what is happening? You don't have an organizing metaphor ("Wordpress for Teachers") that makes intuitive sense and helps your users figure out how to explain what you do to others.

(7) You would probably get better adoption with something like "Wordpress for Teachers" which simplified the install process, targets a specific market that wants your services, and includes default functionality that makes sense for teachers, such as easily converting their posts into a book format for distribution across the platforms they will care about (Amazon, iOS, eBooks, etc.). Not that I would enter this business, but....

Themes are a good idea. A printout mode is also on my list of wanted features. It's a bit tricky to implement because of the collapsed sections.

You are right, the book title is currently visually competing with the top graphic banner and it is a little awkward. This is the result of trying to do a landing page in a textbook oriented format. I should find a better solution to this.

As for the wake turbulence pic, Bookvoid allows me to float graphics left or right and have text wrap around them and it looks better on large devices. However, text wrapping around images sometimes end up squeezing text too much on smaller devices. I will try to find a solution, maybe conditional css or javascript that allows me to achieve best of both world. Good catch.

Interesting take on the Bookvoid name. I had difficulty finding a good name. In the end, the color scheme and name were inspired by an artist I like: Yves Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein#The_Void

As a comparison, I use Dokuwiki for my site, which is similar but a lot more prep to setup and get into (it's not a SAAS). I think if you take a quick look at it, it might give you some ideas for format concepts: http://portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:projects...

Print out one page to see how the layout differs from the screen.

Many people tell me it's too long at there is too much text. Others tell me they don't see what it's for.

Even though I believe strongly in the value Bookvoid provides, the fact that I have difficulty articulating concisely this value is definitely a weakness.

One problem is that it was inspired by machine learning/ Bayesian probabilistic principles of how information should be organised and mathematical principles don't make good tag lines.

Maybe the whole thing is just too wonky. I don't know.