Books are best for non-linear reading.
Illustration by Joon Mo Kang
Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.
Read From Scroll to Screen by Lev Grossman in the NYT. Thanks to Bernard-Henri for the alert.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 6th, 2011 at 20:53
i still like the smell of paper.
September 6th, 2011 at 23:10
I agree with the article — the primary reason why I will probably never be fully comfortable with an e-reader is that it demands linear reading — just like with the scrolls of the pre-codex era.
Unless they improve the software to the point that page-flipping can be simulated pretty closely. But even then, I would miss the smell, feel, and appearance of paper and leather binding. I guess I’m just a codex fetishist.
September 7th, 2011 at 07:56
In tech years, e-readers have been around for a long time. Which makes me wonder why a page flipping feature hasn’t been introduced yet.
Then I got it: Before I read this article, it never really crossed my mind that page-flipping needed to be incorporated into the software. I was thinking as a programmer and was only looking at the problem in terms of research/reference materials. If we’re only going to read reference books then the e-reader technologies are already near perfect. Search features lend themselves well to those types of books. Plus, we rarely page-flip through those.
With existing technology (accelerometers, advanced touch screens, gestures on the iOS,etc) it shouldn’t be difficult to come up with an intuitive implementation of page flipping.