Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited or CAVU - it's a aviation term meaning clear blue open skies, perfect flying conditions. It's a term I've adopted for a number of the projects that I'm building in the open web framework we call The Atmosphere. It feels fitting, open, atmosphere, bluesky...
Not Blogging
Blogs are great, and honestly the 3 big blog platforms that are already built in The Atmosphere – Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint – are all awesome, but none of them are the right fit for what I want.
In addition to writing blog posts here occasionally I've been looking at doing more long form writing in the form of novella or novel length stories. This is driven by a healthy dose of vanity (believing I can write things of that length) and a desire to have something that makes my children want to read the same way I did when the Harry Potter books were first coming out, but with less problematic authors. I personally don't find myself problematic and I know all my own skeletons so I'm going to write something
EPub and EReaders in general are a very solved problem so I don't want to retread that ground too much, but these tool are designed to cater to authors with a publishing deal more than an indie author getting started. It's always struck me how Andy Weir got started by writing The Martian on blog while working a day job as a computer programmer. I thought "I could write a book on my blog during my day job as a computer programmer!"
I've played with a number of blogging platforms for this purpose and there's one fundamental issue with using them to write content like this. Firstly books are long, much longer than a blog post has any right to be. No matter you'll break the book up into multiple posts, but now you've introduced a new problem. Most blog platforms are designed for a individual post being a complete story. It may be "part 3 of 7" but each part stands on it's own, at least in some regard. This isn't a failing of blog platforms it's the format dictated by the needs of the medium. However once you've broken your 12 chapter book into 12 blog posts you need to figure out how to help your readers read them order. It's extra frustrating that for most blog platforms the default is reverse chronological (newest first) which makes sense if you're looking at my thoughts on generative AI but not so much if I'm serializing 12 chapters of a book over a 3 month period.
This leaves authors in the odd spot of going back in and add links to the next entry and the previous entry. keeping everything updated as they go, making sure there's reminders to start from the beginning... but ultimately no matter the approach it feels like you're fighting the platform. What's more as much as I love site's like Leaflet I don't want to write 80,000 words in their web interface, I actually want to write in my editor of choice using my markup of choice.
Fusion
So novel writing, even serialized novel writing is not blogging, but dropping epub files on your website is similarly not the right approach for ease of discovery, what should we do? cavu.page is an attempt to fuse the best of these two worlds together in a unique and meaningful way. It's target is mostly new indie authors, especially if you're publishing serially.
Cavu builds on the great work done by standard.site around coming up with general purpose blogging standards. It then takes the great work done in EPUB around a standard for distributing ebooks and smashes them together.
The biggest addition cavu makes to standard.site is the spine, this is an entry on the publication (usually a blog) we borrow the terminology directly from epub that uses the same approach. A spine give us explicit ordering, decoupled from when a section was written or updated - it's literally the stitching that holds the pages of your story together. What's useful about the spine entry on the publication is that each of the individual parts of the story can still be treated like blog posts in all the ways that were beneficial. Especially for pre-release or serial stories having the tools built to subscribe, notify, and distribute updates across the ecosystem is super helpful. It's when I see that my friends are reading 6 weeks into a serialized story and I don't want to start mid-way through that the explicit ordering really wins.
The power of being Atmospheric
Here's a small novella I wrote last year in cavu.page
Here it is in the excellent standard-reader.app
While the ordering in standard reader is quite bad (in particular because some re-writes moved dates out of order) you can see something important - the whole story is in both places.
What this means is that as a reader if you were to subscribe to this book and then as the author I added a chapter you would see it in your reading list in standard reader. This didn't require any coordination between standard reader and me, just leveraging the standard.site lexicons in an appropriate way for cavu.
Where I get really excited is with what is next. The Atmosphere is itself a whole platform being built by fairly independent or independently minded creators. We are very close to permissioned data spaces being widely available. These will give creators a way to control who can see their content. It's useful for member only forums and group chat. There is also an active effort right now to bring payments into The Atmosphere. Permissioned data, payments, and blogging standards come together to create paid blogs where the reader is put in control of their reading experience and the author is put in control of the payment flow.
By building on top of the structures already present in The Atmosphere cavu gets their benefits, when these things hit Cavu will roll out the ability to sell access to specific portions of books. That means that you can give the first chapters away for free - or maybe any chapter more than 3 weeks old, while monetizing new chapters. As an author you'll choose how much to charge, and how those payments will be made.
Ownership is the Killer Feature
While platforms like cavu.page will need to protect themselves from liability by hiding content that is illegal, the system is setup so that your content never lives on our servers. We can't "take it down" even if we wanted to. That means you publish on your terms, you monetize on your terms. We're going to work on good discovery, reading and authoring experiences over on cavu.page as well as the awesome work on standard-reader.app, bookhive.buzz, and byline.pub. You just need to create something to publish.