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Every e-book reading application I've looked at has gone to great lengths to support left-and-right page-at-a-time navigation. Even though every other application on my phone manges quite well with vertical scrolling. Even though "infinite scrolling" web-page technology has been around for years. Even on my desktop PC, where power and memory consumption is not an issue, and I have a perfectly good scroll-wheel. Some of these applications even add a page-turning animation.
I get it, it's a book, books have pages, it's cute, but it feels as appropriate as a rotary dial on a smart-phone. Why this particular skeuomorphism persists so thoroughly, I cannot comprehend.
I get it, it's a book, books have pages, it's cute, but it feels as appropriate as a rotary dial on a smart-phone. Why this particular skeuomorphism persists so thoroughly, I cannot comprehend.
Christopher Allan Webber, Evan Prodromou, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Kyosuke shared this.
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As you said, it's cute, and probably apps that do "cute things" sell more/get more downloads than the more """boring""" ones that don't.
JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2015-08-20T10:58:17Z
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.
Discrete page-turning, animation or not, works better with media that is already typeset to be on pages. For scrolling you need flawed auto-conversion, costly re-typesetting or you get what the PDF reader does in continuous mode, page margins breaking the scroll.
So it's partly a technical issue, not all skeuomorphism. The animation though, that's silly.
So it's partly a technical issue, not all skeuomorphism. The animation though, that's silly.
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2015-08-20T13:54:04Z
Christopher Allan Webber, illyria likes this.
I'm not a fan of the infinite-scroll on ebooks. I don't use any transitional animations at all; I just go a page at a time. Why? Because I don't care about the animations, but swiping is a lot slower and less precise than a single tap for "next" page.
Isn't infinite-scroll pretty much the same thing as page-turning? Except that instead of eye candy to make something behave like a real-world object, it's making reading less convenient for the sole purpose of making it appear like a web page.
Isn't infinite-scroll pretty much the same thing as page-turning? Except that instead of eye candy to make something behave like a real-world object, it's making reading less convenient for the sole purpose of making it appear like a web page.
I'm looking at EPUB and Mobipocket files, both HTML-based, so it's not already typeset to be on pages.
Page-at-a-time is sensible on an e-ink display, but neither my phone nor my desktop machine have e-ink displays, so that doesn't sway me.
I haven't actually come across any apps yet that support tap-to-turn-a-page, all of them have required various swipes when sometimes nothing happens because you swiped wrong, and sometimes nothing happens because it's reading in and decompressing the next chunk of HTML. Also, for whatever reason my phone's screen does not fit an integer number of lines of text, so when I flip the page I have to find the place where I was up to. At least with smooth scrolling, I can visually track my point of reference.
Page-at-a-time is sensible on an e-ink display, but neither my phone nor my desktop machine have e-ink displays, so that doesn't sway me.
I haven't actually come across any apps yet that support tap-to-turn-a-page, all of them have required various swipes when sometimes nothing happens because you swiped wrong, and sometimes nothing happens because it's reading in and decompressing the next chunk of HTML. Also, for whatever reason my phone's screen does not fit an integer number of lines of text, so when I flip the page I have to find the place where I was up to. At least with smooth scrolling, I can visually track my point of reference.