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There are surprisingly few serious "web books"! I don't even mean "fancy new media books"—just: written primarily for and read primarily on the web.

Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours!

* Butterick's Practical Typography: practicaltypography.com
(more 👇)
* Neural Networks and Deep Learning: neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com

* How to Design Programs (2nd ed): htdp.org

* Circles, Sines, and Signals: jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-…

* Meaningless (is it a book?!): meaningness.com
Then there's the class of "web serializations"—books which started as a series of blog posts, or online fan fiction chapters, which were later serialized into "real" books. Those often lose something in book form, since they weren't "designed in one piece," lack a coherent whole.
Why aren't there more? Well, if you *want* to write a web-first book—again, not even a fancy new-media thing, just a book whose text is online—there's no quick consumer-grade solution. Spin up Ghost and write some HTML, I guess. Or elaborately theme a Wordpress?
Then there's the monetization problem. Lots of people have web sites which vend a PDF, but that's different.

More fundamentally, maybe one barrier is just that reading long-form texts—especially book-length texts—on screens is pretty miserable! notes.andymatuschak.org/Reading_texts_…


(Aside: Why so much programming material? It’s a striking sign that publishing a web book still has significant technical barriers)
These guides look awfully polished (haven’t read any yet myself!):

I didn’t know that this lovingly crafted and very personal book on the philosophy of design was available as a web book:
Highly recommended on both counts:

This is the true winning answer. This book was *so important* to me growing up. Reading it was the first time I realized that programming didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be expressive. It’s dead but archived here: poignant.guide
This web book is quite lovingly crafted: resilientwebdesign.com
Yet more great recommendations from Ryan:

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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
One way to look at memory systems' efficiency is marginal cost: I can choose to "pay" 5m over my lifetime to memorize the answer to a question.

I find it generative to flip that around. Say I saturated 10 minutes of review daily—what would that casual practice unlock? (thread)
This framing maps better onto my lived experience. I review during interstitial dead time I'd probably misuse. It doesn't "cost" 10 minutes: it's free, so long as it stays in that timebox.

Empirically, I find my reviews stay <10 minutes so long as I cap new questions to 40/day.
If I could add 40 questions a day, that would mean I could add 14,600 questions a year, at the cost of 10 minutes a day!

The first chapter of Quantum Country is 112 questions, so that amount to something like memorizing the material from 130 textbook chapters!
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
About a year ago, I started working independently from home. Being totally in control of my own time & environment really removed all excuses! If I'm not having a good day, it's no one's fault but mine. I found that a steady routine really helped.

Some things that worked for me:
* same pre-work routine every day (wake, exercise, shower, meditate, walk dog, make coffee)

* start the day with my hardest creative work (2h+ writing): notes.andymatuschak.org/My_morning_wri…

* big-chunk working blocks: 7:30-10, 10-noon, 1-4
* during working blocks, I alternate between 35m focused unitasking and 5m breaks

* no internet until after first block, intentionally-scheduled internet time afterwards

* I usually only take meetings after 4; if I don't have any, I'll do email and little tasks 4-6
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Filmmakers, composers, and playwrights carefully author the time dimension of their work. The feeling of a pregnant pause and an accelerando comes from viewers' experience of passing time. Those mediums express a few hours’ evolving experience—what about days, months, years? 👇
Cultural institutions often author experiences that stretch over longer time scales (e.g. multi-year religious coming-of-age rituals). But mass mediums rarely do.

That’s an unfortunate limitation: mass mediums give authors enormous reach!
Books have a longer time dimension, but it’s generally unauthored.

Books often take months to read. But they almost never have an *authored* time dimension like that of films or plays. The days and weeks are rarely specified by the author the way minutes are by a filmmaker.
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