Lukas Mathis on Scrolling .vs. Page-flipping

[In response to a response][link], he grabs this quote from Kottke:

>The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?

He says:

>How is scrolling desirable to the person who is trying to read a book? If I’m reading a book, I want to fill the screen with text. Then, I want to read that text. Then, I want to fill the whole screen with new text, and read that.

and I smile and nod, because he is extremely right. The reason the page-flip metaphor still works is that my eyes/brain shouldn’t have to be in charge of figuring out where I am in the text every time I scroll.

It’s not as simple as eliminating “pages” entirely, I think, but re-implementing the _good_ functionality of pages.

[link]: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/03/06/jon_bell_on_scrolling/ “ignore the code: Jon Bell on Scrolling”


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