Here’s the main thing I don’t get about “reading electronically”: the enduring idea of the page. A page is a physical conception, and physical conceptions often lose their meaning in digital applications. I get that there’s satisfaction in flipping a page. I get that there’s some mental accomplishment in saying, “I’m on page 75 of 252.” But do we still need these constructs in a more digital reading medium? I argue that we don’t, and that this is a time to return back to the world of scrolling.
I don’t get why people hate the concept of scrolling. We’ve had scrolls as instruments of communicating the written word for at least as long as we’ve had pages as a construct. My favorite iAnything app right now is Instapaper, which doesn’t use the page metaphor at all. To the left is a screenshot from my iPhone of Instapaper. You can see that, on that page, I’m about 3/4 of the way through the document. I don’t need anything more than that. If I’m wondering, “Do I want to keep reading this?” I don’t have to check the page count — I just put a finger on the screen and can see where I am in the reading.
Some will argue that the page conception allows random access: “I know this is on page 74. I remember reading it there.” I will grant that, but in a digital medium, it’s not as if it’s difficult to search. You don’t need a codex to tell you that Le Châtelier’s principle is on page 96 of your chemistry text, when you can search for it just as easily.
Do we still need the page? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to listen to the page’s defenders.
I have actually enabled Pagination in Instapaper. I prefer tapping on the screen to have it give me a new page than scrolling periodically to see more text. I have tried the tilt-to-scroll feature and it just doesn’t feel natural to me. I have to hold my phone a certain way to keep the text from scrolling. I would prefer to just touch the screen and have a new bit of text appear.
I don’t use the tilt-to-scroll function. That just doesn’t work. I use a flick—well, a drag.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading at work this week and I specifically have ensured that Word and Acrobat are showing in a page format so that I can change pages with a single keyboard click rather than having to scroll. If I’m scrolling, I either scroll as I go or I essentially paginate, but have to control the scroll manually… and neither method is all that appealing to me for longer books.
As for random access, I appreciate the Kindle’s use of location rather than page. Since you can change the font size, page numbers have no meaning in that environment. But there is a location that can be jumped to for immediate access.
Exactly. Let me use a single tap/keystroke to give me a completely new screen of text.
Phillistines!
The “page” is a grey area now.
From where I’m coming from, scrolling is a very bad thing. Even though over 90% of the pages require a scroll, only about 65% of the users actually make it to the halfway point of the page (Neilsen repots that users spend over 80% of their time above the fold). So, if my call-to-action is at the bottom, at that point, only about 15% of the audience is seeing it. It really hacks into opportunistic converts.
All of that being said, the page has little to no meaning when it comes to the e-book sector. You’re going to read it if it’s broken into 5 pages or 50, as long as it’s the same content.