4 ms·

I'm so tired of sites trying to bring animated/turnable pages to the web. Pages make sense when you're constrained to to the size of a physical book, but here o

I'm so tired of sites trying to bring animated/turnable pages to the web. Pages make sense when you're constrained to to the size of a physical book, but here on the web you can have infinitely long pages with sections divided however you want. There should be no need to click a button to advance or split your text by what fits onto a page, and it certainly shouldn't need to break the Find tool. I have to admit that some of these books make great use of the layout, with 2-page wide drawings and text fit around the illustration. However, that same effect can be accomplished with vertical scrolling (as Medium has done) and those 2-page wide drawings get split in half on mobile where only one page is visible at a time.

marvindanig 11y ago
Medium is a blogging platform. The comparison is just plain wrong. > ... but here on the web you can have ... pages with sections divided however you want. Yep, exactly. :-)
- slang800 11y ago
  > Medium is a blogging platform. The comparison is just plain wrong. Yes, I'm familiar with the type of work they publish, but I'm talking about those beautiful full-width images they use (https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215679797-Images https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215679797-Images), in comparison with the 2-page wide images used in some of the example books. And full-width images have even worked well for longform stories like https://medium.com/matter/who-killed-the-jeff-davis-8-d1b813e13581 https://medium.com/matter/who-killed-the-jeff-davis-8-d1b813... ... Just look at those illustrations and consistent color-palette, absolutely beautiful. > > ... but here on the web you can have ... pages with sections divided however you want. > Yep, exactly. :-) The phrase "infinitely long" is important. Without it, it sounds like I'm talking about fixed-size pages, rather than a single page encompassing an entire chapter or even an entire book.
accordionclown 11y ago
> There should be no need to click a button to advance it's not as if a user doesn't need to do any manipulation of any kind in order to scroll. with that being the case, i don't see how clicking a button to "turn a page" is worse. and as pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content, to avoid problems such as pictures split across the viewport, i see pagination as a much smarter mechanism in many cases... but a hybrid mode that enables both preferences is the best. -bowerbird
- marvindanig 11y ago
  > pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content. This is super super critical! Piece-mealing helps people remember the content better. It has a direct impact on the ability to recall and then apply those concepts later in life. It is pertinent to mention here that web is no longer desktop only. It is there on mobile and tablets and people consume web on each differently at different times of the day. It will be very wrong to assume that our application interfaces do not have to evolve accordingly. And by that I mean a lot of hearsay from 2003 isn't valid anymore. For example, it can be a real pain to read an essay on mobile that has reflowed into what one would call a thick "billing paper roll". You keep scrolling and scrolling and not even be at the middle of the article by the time you're done. In fact many people quit reading blogposts midway just after 2-3 downswipes and then they reopen it on their desktops. For a book, it is simply out of question.
  - slang800 11y ago
    > Piece-mealing helps people remember the content better. Chunking (in the context of cognitive science) does help with recall, but I rarely see pages being used to group relevant information... The tendency seems to be "fit as much as you can on a page, and only break to the next page early if you reach the end of the chapter". This doesn't apply to picture-books (where the use of illustrations is dictates layout more than the text), but it does apply to the _majority_ of published books. I see "chapter (or header) -> paragraph -> sentence -> word" as the way written works are organized, with pages providing an index for lookup and marking progress, but not for denoting meaning. For example, I'll remember the story Contracrostipunctus and that it was at the end of chapter 3 in GEB, but I don't have a clue what page it was on and if the page numbers changed between editions (or were removed entirely), I probably wouldn't notice. > It is there on mobile and tablets and people consume web on each differently That's part of why pages are such a pain. On my phone (which is significantly smaller than a book) I need to scroll from the top to the bottom of the page, and then turn the page and scroll back to the top. On some readers that present fixed-width pages with a tiny font this is even worse because the pages don't reflow to the width of my device and I need to scroll left-to-right for every single line. Bubblin doesn't have this problem - it just crops off the left side of the page and refuses to let me zoom, but I write this with the assumption that it'll be fixed and will exhibit the aforementioned problems simply by virtue of having a fixed-size layout. > You keep scrolling and scrolling and not even be at the middle of the article by the time you're done. In fact many people quit reading blogposts midway just after 2-3 downswipes and then they reopen it on their desktops. Citation? I've never done this before or seen it done. I actually like reading books on my phone because I can lay in bed in any position and read till I fall asleep.
dang 11y ago
> I'm so tired of I know this is the kind of thing it's easy to lead with on the internet without thinking, but for present purposes it does not count as nice. Please be nice in these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627.
- slang800 11y ago
  If being nice precludes offering a legitimate criticism, then I'm happy to be mean. I didn't use an ad-hominem, or attack some trivial mistake in their implementation. I am opening a conversation on, what I see as, a growing trend to emulate physical books on the web and impose a layout limitation where (I think) it doesn't make sense.
  - dang 11y ago
    > If being nice precludes offering a legitimate criticism It doesn't! That's the whole point right there.

marvindanig 11y ago

Medium is a blogging platform. The comparison is just plain wrong. > ... but here on the web you can have ... pages with sections divided however you want. Yep, exactly. :-)

slang800 11y ago
> Medium is a blogging platform. The comparison is just plain wrong. Yes, I'm familiar with the type of work they publish, but I'm talking about those beautiful full-width images they use (https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215679797-Images https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215679797-Images), in comparison with the 2-page wide images used in some of the example books. And full-width images have even worked well for longform stories like https://medium.com/matter/who-killed-the-jeff-davis-8-d1b813e13581 https://medium.com/matter/who-killed-the-jeff-davis-8-d1b813... ... Just look at those illustrations and consistent color-palette, absolutely beautiful. > > ... but here on the web you can have ... pages with sections divided however you want. > Yep, exactly. :-) The phrase "infinitely long" is important. Without it, it sounds like I'm talking about fixed-size pages, rather than a single page encompassing an entire chapter or even an entire book.

accordionclown 11y ago

> There should be no need to click a button to advance it's not as if a user doesn't need to do any manipulation of any kind in order to scroll. with that being the case, i don't see how clicking a button to "turn a page" is worse. and as pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content, to avoid problems such as pictures split across the viewport, i see pagination as a much smarter mechanism in many cases... but a hybrid mode that enables both preferences is the best. -bowerbird

marvindanig 11y ago
> pagination gives the ability to "chunk" the content. This is super super critical! Piece-mealing helps people remember the content better. It has a direct impact on the ability to recall and then apply those concepts later in life. It is pertinent to mention here that web is no longer desktop only. It is there on mobile and tablets and people consume web on each differently at different times of the day. It will be very wrong to assume that our application interfaces do not have to evolve accordingly. And by that I mean a lot of hearsay from 2003 isn't valid anymore. For example, it can be a real pain to read an essay on mobile that has reflowed into what one would call a thick "billing paper roll". You keep scrolling and scrolling and not even be at the middle of the article by the time you're done. In fact many people quit reading blogposts midway just after 2-3 downswipes and then they reopen it on their desktops. For a book, it is simply out of question.
- slang800 11y ago
  > Piece-mealing helps people remember the content better. Chunking (in the context of cognitive science) does help with recall, but I rarely see pages being used to group relevant information... The tendency seems to be "fit as much as you can on a page, and only break to the next page early if you reach the end of the chapter". This doesn't apply to picture-books (where the use of illustrations is dictates layout more than the text), but it does apply to the _majority_ of published books. I see "chapter (or header) -> paragraph -> sentence -> word" as the way written works are organized, with pages providing an index for lookup and marking progress, but not for denoting meaning. For example, I'll remember the story Contracrostipunctus and that it was at the end of chapter 3 in GEB, but I don't have a clue what page it was on and if the page numbers changed between editions (or were removed entirely), I probably wouldn't notice. > It is there on mobile and tablets and people consume web on each differently That's part of why pages are such a pain. On my phone (which is significantly smaller than a book) I need to scroll from the top to the bottom of the page, and then turn the page and scroll back to the top. On some readers that present fixed-width pages with a tiny font this is even worse because the pages don't reflow to the width of my device and I need to scroll left-to-right for every single line. Bubblin doesn't have this problem - it just crops off the left side of the page and refuses to let me zoom, but I write this with the assumption that it'll be fixed and will exhibit the aforementioned problems simply by virtue of having a fixed-size layout. > You keep scrolling and scrolling and not even be at the middle of the article by the time you're done. In fact many people quit reading blogposts midway just after 2-3 downswipes and then they reopen it on their desktops. Citation? I've never done this before or seen it done. I actually like reading books on my phone because I can lay in bed in any position and read till I fall asleep.

dang 11y ago

> I'm so tired of I know this is the kind of thing it's easy to lead with on the internet without thinking, but for present purposes it does not count as nice. Please be nice in these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627.

slang800 11y ago
If being nice precludes offering a legitimate criticism, then I'm happy to be mean. I didn't use an ad-hominem, or attack some trivial mistake in their implementation. I am opening a conversation on, what I see as, a growing trend to emulate physical books on the web and impose a layout limitation where (I think) it doesn't make sense.
- dang 11y ago
  > If being nice precludes offering a legitimate criticism It doesn't! That's the whole point right there.