Lukas Mathis on Scrolling .vs. Page-flipping

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.

Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.

Written by Nick Disabato (nickd), soon to be self-published:

I’m writing a book called Cadence & Slang, due in late 2010. It’s about interaction design, which is the art and craft of making technology easier to use. There have been many products in the past decade that take generous advantage of good design – the iPod, the Flip Video, the Wii – and fortunately we’re moving more in this direction. Technology used to be an awful lot more complex and overwhelming, and we’ve since learned to make it simpler.

Back the project on Kickstarter, so I can read this thing. See also: the book’s outline (PDF), and it’s official site.