A real page turner
I was listening to the excellent I.A. Podcast with Jeff Parks the other day. In the episode titled “Working in the post-industrial era” with Dorian Taylor they spoke about many interesting subjects concerning modern working practices.
Early on in the conversation Jeff and Dorian discuss some of the drawbacks inherent in following UI metaphors too closely. Making an operating system resemble a home office certainly allows an inexperienced user to start working more quickly, but there are times that the computing power available in modern personal computers can be leveraged to process and display information in far more interesting ways.
Later they discuss the implementation of the page turn in Apple’s new iBooks application. The speakers question whether the animated representation of the page turning is a useful device. The point is made that the design of books was initially a compromise in technology at the time; a trade-off between portability and accessibility. In terms of readability, it is asked, surely the scroll scores more highly? So why do Apple try and recreate the physical book in the iBooks application on the iPhone and iPad? Is it really necessary to force the user to swipe their hand across the screen simply to turn the page? Wouldn’t it be easier to have the content scroll vertically, allowing the user to read a constant stream of text rather than ‘turning’ the pages manually.
So this got me thinking, and whilst I agree that the hand swipe and animation is superfluous, I would argue that the concept of the page itself provides the user with more utility than the boundless vertical scroll.
Personally I haven’t taken to reading books that scroll vertically. I like the feeling of progress achieved by turning the pages, by moving my eyes from the top to the bottom of the page. Also, as the page is static, I feel sure my reading speed is quicker. Textbooks benefit from having their figures and diagrams in a set ‘position’ on the page because you remember the layout of a page and that aids recollection. True, electronic pages are more easily searched so page-layout memory is less important, but I think the page format is a positive aspect of a book.
I’m surprised I like the fixed-page layout in some respects. In the past I’ve recommended clients don’t use page turning effects implemented in Flash or PDF. However, my dislike is more to do with the implementation itself which used to be slow to load, buggy and time-consuming to update.
I do find the animation itself to be unnecessary. Yes it looks nice and responds well (the page follows the finger closely and does feel like it’s being pulled by the user) but I have the feeling this novelty would wear off. Speaking with iPad owners who read books, I discover most of them have turned the animation off and simply tap on the right-hand side of the page to advance. I think this offers the best of both worlds – discrete pages combined with a simple page turner. The Kindle does this by default of course, with the page sliding in right-left as the reader presses the advance button.
I’d be interested to hear how you turn the pages of your electronic books, why not let me know, below.
Hi Dorian,
Many thanks for taking the time to write and providing some fascinating linked resources. I couldn’t agree more that computers are at their best when they aren’t constrained to linear processing and I hope the tiny bit I pulled out of a lengthy and inspiring conversation doesn’t lead people to think page animations were all you talked about! 
I find Ted Nelson’s work fascinating, at the very least for his four maxims: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong”. Although the first and last aren’t great motivation for keeping a blog!
Thanks,
Tim
Thanks for the writeup, Tim!
What I was actually trying to get at (which I probably could have expressed more thoroughly) is that a computer isn’t constrained to the linear format of a book. I mention that conventional prose carries a significant overhead of material which is ancillary to the actual message. This includes things such as defining terms and illustrating concepts that familiar readers have to incur the energy to process. At the same time the piece might also refer to terms and concepts which a reader might be unaccustomed to, causing them to go in search for a definition or skip the message entirely.
I posit instead that we might be better served in taking advantage of the unique properties of computers when we create works of text for them. By this I specifically mean hypertext. Not hypertext as de facto defined by the Web but as originally defined by the coiner of the term, Ted Nelson. He, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and their numerous followers are my collective inspiration for this idea.
There are particular patterns and technologies that are peculiar to consuming text on computers have yet to be deployed en masse. These include transclusion, stretchtext, bidirectional links, multiple links emanating from the same source and the ability to preserve trails pertaining to specific lines of inquiry. There is also an overarching idea of reducing the size of a given resource in favour of maximizing the number of links between small semantic units (PDF, ironically).
The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements are a step in the right direction for this objective, and those are where I am concentrating the bulk of my attention.
Cheers!