Chapter 5
What Is a Local Webbook?

One of the dis­ad­van­tages of a web­book is that a user has to be con­nect­ed to the inter­net in order for web­book to work. Is this real­ly true? It turns out the answer is no. In fact, you can cre­ate a web­book that some­one can use on their com­put­er with­out being con­nect­ed to the internet.

How does that work? You sim­ply take all the files (HTML + media) and fold­ers of the web­book and zip them into a ZIP file. You then send the ZIP file to the user attached to an email mes­sage; or the user down­loads the ZIP file from a website.

Once deliv­ered, the user must unzip the ZIP file in a place where he or she can access the first web­page of your web­book. Every­thing in the web­book will then work offline just as it nor­mal­ly works online except for the hyper­links to out­side resources on the web (which require an inter­net connection).

The Problem

The prob­lem lies in how the user han­dles the ZIP file. Many users will down­load the ZIP file, or receive it by email, but not know where the ZIP file is on their com­put­er to access it. Even after they locate the ZIP file, they may not know how to unzip it in a place where they can find it. For many users this is old hat. But for oth­er users it’s a mys­tery. Thus, you will have to pro­vide instruc­tions on how to han­dle the ZIP file, unzip it, and place the unzipped files and fold­ers some­where where the user can find them easily.

The prob­lem is even more seri­ous on phones and tablets where it’s often more dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out how to han­dle files and fold­ers. In addi­tion, to manip­u­late files and fold­ers, a user needs to have a com­pe­tent file-man­ag­er app on their portable device. There­fore, your instruc­tions for some­one to take your web­book ZIP file and use it on a phone or tablet prob­a­bly has to include instruc­tions on how to down­load a good file man­ag­er pro­gram (app) first. You can see that the prob­lem, which is minor on a lap­top or desk­top, becomes a more dif­fi­cult prob­lem to explain for a phone or tablet.

Relative Links

To con­struct a work­able local web­site, all the links to inter­nal files have to be rel­a­tive links. If they are absolute links they won’t work offline. (See Chap­ter 12 for more infor­ma­tion on rel­a­tive linking.)

If you use Word­Press to cre­ate your web­book, you can­not eas­i­ly pro­vide a local web­book. Although it’s not impos­si­ble to do, it’s not prac­ti­cal to teach a user how to do it.

Conclusion

Deliv­er­ing a web­book by ZIP file to be used on a com­put­ing device with­out con­nect­ing to the web is a great idea. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it may not be easy for many users to implement.