Lukas Mathis on Scrolling .vs. Page-flipping
Phil Nelson In response to a response, 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.