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Page Flipping

Here’s an article called “Why flipping through paper-like pages endures in the digital world” that unfortunately doesn’t look at the answers in any kind of interesting way. Especially since it hasn’t “endured” so much as it’s making a comeback.

Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content. Some of these visual cues are comically exaggerated (iBooks), some are more subdued (Instapaper’s “Fast Pagination” action) and others fit somewhere in between (Flipboard). But each presents a challenge to developers attempting to blend the tactility of real-world pages with the digitally native tablet aesthetic.

Developers do realize it, which is why they (usually) build it in. And the desire isn’t subconscious—if I can’t immediately tell that a page has changed, I am very conscious of the confusion that creates and the half second it takes me to examine the text to make sure it’s different than the text I just read. Personally, I like a quick page-to-page fade, or the iPhone Kindle slide effect. Page transitions that mimic actual books are kind of ludicrous. McLuhan would hate them. Or love them, I guess.

The point is this: we once moved from scrolls to books, so we shouldn’t be all that shocked that we’re moving from scrolling to book-like page transitions. What makes it more interesting this time around is that we don’t actually need to. Though in the case of reading on my iPad, a slight right-to-left twitch of my thumb is vastly easier than scrolling the entire length of the screen from bottom to top, so maybe it is the same thing.

Give Me Something to Read

Give Me Something to Read’s best long reads of 2011. [via]

Reading books in a world of distractions.

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

Readability has relaunched as a monthly subscription services (with 70% going to content publishers). It’s gorgeous, but I’m curious what the relationship to or with Instapaper is going to be.

UPDATE: The New York Times looks at the recent trend of apps that redesign how we read the web. It also answers the question of the Readability/Instapaper relationship (Instapaper’s mobile apps will also serve as Readability’s mobile apps after their next iOS update).

Kindle Singles are like really long blog posts for your Kindle.

Alexander Chee on the modern state of reading.

I had resisted. Partly for the obvious reason: I love books. I remember how it felt when I found copies of Derek Jarman’s Dancing Ledge and David Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline and Close to the Knives on Dustin’s shelves in the first days of our courtship. We never discussed whether it was OK for us to have doubles of those because we know better than to ask each other about it. A lover’s e-reader just doesn’t give off the same feeling of secrets and possible belonging in the way a bookshelf can. E-books will never be rare books or limited editions. It just isn’t the point of an e-book.

Give Me Something to Read’s best articles of 2010. [via]

Load up your Instapaper: The best magazine articles ever. Not that anyone bothered to ask me, but I’ve always liked this piece from Vancouver magazine, which I saw when my wife was a judge for the Western Magazine Awards and not because I scour magazines for stories about hockey goalies. [via]