sBooks reinvent the software of the book to make digital online reading better than offline analog reading. sBooks are:
social, engaging readers across space and time, both synchronously and asynchronously;
semantic, tagging content with rich concepts for better search and browsing;
service-based, adding value and sustainability through continuing augmentation and connection.
natural, matching the salience and convenience a physical book;
portable, moving easily across devices, networks, and content.
Better than 'just as good.' Most e-book (electronic book) technology aims to create experiences which are 'just as good' as reading an ordinary paper book. sBooks aim to create reading experiences which are more engaging, informative, expansive, and satisfying than even well-designed material books.
The sBooks platform is an open standards-based platform developed by beingmeta and leveraging beingmeta's knowlets technology, it's BRICO knowledge base and the WebEchoes social browsing application.
The web client for the sBooks platform is licensed free of
charge for non-commercial use under
the GNU
GPL (version 2 or later) and
the Creative
Commons Attribution
Share-Alike 
license. Use of WebEchoes, the social component of the sBooks
platform, is also provided
free of charge for use with open content and
meta-content.
Social reading means that readers can make notes (called 'echoes') as they read and share those notes with friends, colleagues, or communities. Social reading is symmetrical: readers get their friends echoes and vice versa. Echoes can also be limited or focused by a particular tribe (e.g. group, organization, or fan community).
Semantic search uses an sBooks' knowlet — a lightweight knowledge base — to find tagged content. When searching with a knowlet, readers don't need to know the author's exact language but learn the author's language while searching. A book's knowlet can be used or extended in echoes, either from friends, communities, or overdocs.
Overdocs are collections of echoes created for a particular document or set of documents. Readers choose overdocs (including by subscription or purchase) and their associated echoes are integrated into their sBooks across different media.
Ambient navigation subtly reveals the sBooks structure while reading. Physical books naturally disclose their content's length and arrangement. Simple interactions (e.g. thumbing pages) yields more detailed information and overviews. sBooks provide these kinds of cues and interactions in electronic forms.
At beingmeta, we believe that media should reflect the transcendence of the ideas they carry. Because of that, we are committed to making sBooks, including their rich background and social context, as portable as possible.
The web-based sBooks platform is based on open standards (XHTML and knowlets) and we strive to make it work as well as possible across different browsers and operating environments. We are also working to make sBooks as accessible as possible and applying beingmeta's semantic technologies to especially support reading by non-native speakers.
sBooks can also be automatically converted, together with their attached social, structural, and semantic contexts, to open book formats (such as EPUB or MOBI). Even the printed versions of sBooks reflect this portability, including 2-D barcodes which can bring readers from printed documents to online resources and conversations.
As far as possible, we also want to bring rich versions of the sBooks experiences to new devices and e-readers.
Publishing with the sBooks platform for the Web is as easy as making a few changes to your HTML documents and providing them on your site. sBooks uses the standard HTML organizational markup to make your documents easier to navigate, browse, search, and share. You can read more about converting HTML to using sBooks in our publishers guide or drop us a note about using our automatic conversion tools.
