Some very good points made over at marco.org by Marco Arment, the author of InstaPaper. This is one of the things that I waffle on since many of the very elegant UIs developed for the Mac and the iPhone are based on real world objects. One excellent example is iCal for the iPad. An excellent rendition of a planner - and it seems to work.
However, I agree with the the points made by Marco especially as applied to eBooks and other instances of longer, mostly unstructured text. There’s no reason to use any kind of pseudo page-turning animations for eBooks. It slows things down, is utterly unnecessary and often just confuses the issue of what it is that you’re trying to do - that is to ingest a maximum of textual data in a minimum of time (at least if you’re a speed reader).
This is the reason that Stanza is my preferred eBook reader on the iPhone. It’s clean and a single tap on the right side of the screen gives me a new page of text to read with a minimum of animation and practically no delay. In practice, the UI (none, in fact) truly disappears and as a result all I’m aware of after a few minutes is the flow of text and the story in front of me. This invisible interface is discoverable with the rendered overaly that pops up briefly when you open a book.
I’ve tried a few of the other eBook readers out there and come back to Stanza every time due to the utter lack of eye-candy and speed. I tried a SONY eReader recently and the page blanking routine drove me nuts, even though it’s relatively fast. But it interrupted me every time I turned the page.
Apple’s version may be too much (for me)
I suspect that unless Apple’s eBook reader offers some way of disabling the pretty pseudo page turning animations and the wasted space of the pile of pages on the borders I’ll be sticking to Stanza (hoping of course that Amazon will port the current incarnation to the iPad).
Context means a lot
Now this isn’t to say that there aren’t cases where beautifully rendered real world objects aren’t appropriate, but in general this is for interacting with much more structured data where the object gives context to the data. iCal being again an excellent example - viewing calendar entries in a long list view is inefficient since we have a notion of context associated with dates and their relationships. Week and month views add value to the interaction and the rendering of a planner is extremely appropriate in this context. The level of detail in these cases is up to the individual developer and the emotional attachment we might have with the physical version.
But we mustn’t slavishly reproduce real world objects just because we can. Out methods of consuming information evolve over time based on the supports that we use. But these packages are based on the tools and materials of the day. Why shouldn’t the iPad be rendering books as scrolls? Arguably, the scroll was used (and is still used in some places) for much longer historically that our current paperback format. Both are reflections of the available materials, tools of the day, and the associated costs involved. On screen reading offers many different possibilities than static, paginated blocks of text.
Use your imagination
Many science fiction authors experimented with the concept of readers that pushed up a side-scrolling flow of text where the user controlled the speed of the flow based on their personal abilllity to interpret the text. Gordon R. Dickson’s “Wolfling” (1969) even uses this as a plot device to single out the ruling class with their ability to read and react faster than the general population. Robert A. Heinlein posited the use of this type of device in many stories.
Now I’m not saying that this is the future of reading, but it’s another possibility to explore as long as we don’t get bogged down with our historical baggage. This raises the possibility that a 3.5” smartphone screen may in fact be sufficiently large for this style of reading.