“Touchscreens, zoomable maps, page swiping, and more, all integrated into one Eames-chair-equipped media room.” MIT, late ’70s, and noted by Andy Hertzfeld as a direct influence for the original Macintosh. Fantastic story by The Verge. Favourite part: even back then, there was concern among the scientists that the touch screen page flipping animation was frivolous.
Your favorite part: “even back then, there was concern among the scientists that the touch screen page flipping animation was frivolous.’
And their conclusion: “He goes on to say continuous scrolling doesn’t give readers a good sense of reading progress, and page-flipping provides effective, direct feedback.”
I don’t do eBooks, so I guess I can’t comment further, but I have a feeling there are as many people that love page flipping as hate it.
The problem with Ebooks is that they are trying to emulate real books too much. Just scroll the darn page, and let me see a progress bar.
There’s still a good technical reason for flipping, with e-ink based e-book readers… they don’t really do any sort of scrolling UI well.
(and while one might argue they’re a dead end vs. more “universal” tablets – they are still quite popular, and the supposed future improvements in durability and cost reduction, together with their low power requirements, could keep them desirable …especially for billions of people with, say, unreliable electricity; maybe we should make general usage UI for e-ink devices)
PS. Some of the folklore stories linked from the Busy_Being_Born,_Part_2 are fascinating
…for example:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Realit…
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Are_Yo…
Edited 2012-05-31 23:45 UTC
A lot of people have been educated through the use of internet to scroll through a continuous single page, a choice done for technical reasons (reduce requests to the web server – that was before the search for pay-per-click that leeads many websites to split articles in several pages).
But given we are not using any more papyrus or parchment rolls, but switched to multi-paged books (even though the spine is difficult to make), I guess the best form factor has already been determined by a few centuries of experience by book printers.
The only reasons for the switch from scrolls to books was that the former was less easy to search through and more susceptable to damage due to constant rolling and unrolling. Neither applies today, so maybe scrolling is the way forward.
Personally, I hope not. I can never help but fiddle to keep the current paragraph in the centre of the screen, given the option. Please still my twitching finger; gimmee fixed pages.
Page flipping only works on physical books, where you get the progress feedback of the pile of pages on the right shrinking and the one on the left growing as you advance through a book.
You don’t get that kind of feedback flipping pages on an e book and you’re stuck relying on progress bar or a popup “Page 42 of 231”, so I don’t see the point in using page-flipping over scrolling on e books.
I would rather remember that I was on page 125 of 500 than I was 25% of the way through a scroll. Computers can remember my position but they can also forget them.
Really though, why one or the other? A simple checkbox preference should be able to move from one experience to the other. It is just presentation after all. It is not like there is physical media to tie you down.