Books on the Web:
Achieving seamless reading experiences

For a demonstration of how to enable seamless reading experiences of Web publications for users even when they are offline, see the following:

• A simple “readme” document that provides more details and explains how to view the demo content offline.
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island as a offline-enabled web book—all 34 chapters, plus all 115 of Louis Rhead’s illustrations from the 1915 Harper’s edition of the novel.

For each, in browsers that support Service Workers, you'll see a checkbox that enables you to continue having a seamless reading experience even if the state of your Internet connection changes and you drop offline.

After you check that box, you’ll see a message saying Caching complete! This Web publication is now readable offline. (For the Treasure Island web book, it may take a while for the message to appear, depending on the speed of your Internet connection—it needs to cache about 109MB of content).

But once that …now readable offline message appears, turn off your WiFi, remove your Ethernet cable, or put your phone into Airplane Mode, and you’ll still be able to continue reading the content, at the same URL—just as if you were still online.

Credits: These demos are both based on an earlier demo created by Jake Archibald.