The New World of Notebook Publishing

Wolfram Notebooks on the Web

We’ve been working towards it for many years, but now it’s finally here: an incredibly smooth workflow for publishing Wolfram Notebooks to the web---that makes possible a new level of interactive publishing and computation-enabled communication.
You create a Wolfram Notebook---using all the power of the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Notebook system---on the desktop or in the cloud. Then you just press a button to publish it to the Wolfram Cloud---and immediately anyone anywhere can both read and interact with it on the web.
It's an unprecedentedly easy way to get rich, interactive, computational content onto the web. And---together with the power of the Wolfram Language as a computational language---it promises to usher in a new era of computational communication, and to be a crucial driver for the development of "computational X" fields.
When a Wolfram Notebook is published to the cloud, it’s immediately something people can read and interact with. But it’s more than that. Because if you press the Make Your Own Copy button, you’ll get your own copy of the notebook, which you can not only read and interact with, but also edit and do computation in, right on the web. And what this means is that the notebook becomes not just something you look at, but something you can immediately use and build on.
And, by the way, we've set it up so that anyone can make their own copy of a published notebook, and start using it; all they need is a (free) Cloud Basic account. And people with Cloud Basic accounts can even publish their own notebooks in the cloud, though if they want to store them long term they'll have to upgrade their account. (Through the Wolfram Foundation, we're also developing a permanent curated Notebook Archive for public-interest notebooks.)
There are lots of other important workflows too. On a computer, you can immediately download notebooks to your desktop, and run them there natively using the latest version of the Wolfram Player that we've made freely available for many years. You can also run notebooks natively on iOS devices using the Wolfram Player app. And the Wolfram Cloud app (on iOS or Android) gives you a streamlined way to make your own copy of a notebook to work with in the cloud.
You can publish a Wolfram Notebook to the cloud, and you can use it as a complete, rich webpage. But you can also embed the notebook inside an existing webpage, providing anything from a single (perhaps dynamically updated) graphic to a full interactive interface or embedded document.
And, by the way, the exact same technology that enables Wolfram Notebooks in the cloud also allows you to immediately set up Wolfram Language APIs or form interfaces, for use either directly on the web, or through client libraries in languages like Python and Java.

The Story of Notebooks

We invented notebooks in 1988 as the main interface for Mathematica Version 1.0, and over the past three decades, many millions of Wolfram Notebooks have been made. Some record ongoing work, some are exercises, and some contain discoveries small and large. Some are expositions, presentations or online books and papers. Some are interactive demonstrations. And with the emergence of the Wolfram Language as a full-scale computational language, more and more now serve as rich computational essays, communicating with unprecedented effectiveness in a mixture of human language and computational language.
Over the years, we've progressively polished the notebook experience with a long series of user interface innovations, adapted and optimized for successive generations of desktop systems. But what's allowed us now to do full-scale notebook publishing on the web is that---after many years of work---we've managed to get a polished version of Wolfram Notebooks running in the cloud, much as they do on desktop.

What’s in a Notebook

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Computational Journals

Changing the Way I Work