

The Mechanic Muse: From Scroll to Screen - rmah
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html

======
rubergly
I found the conclusion at the end of the article, that e-readers as a platform
are incapable of non-linear reading, a bit silly to be making about e-readers
as a whole.

These complaints are really issues of software, and UI specifically. The
technology needed to add a "Go to random page" option to the Kindle is
absolutely trivial; it's a matter of the UI developing enough that features
like that actually surface to be given visual prominence equaling their
demand. I really do find the experience of looking back a couple pages
extremely painful on a Kindle; that experience is screaming for UI
improvements (which are probably a lot easier on a touchscreen; I'm imaging
something like iOS video scrubbing).

I'm sure it took at least a bit of time for the concept of codex page numbers
to develop, and I'm sure until that point people thought "with scrolls, we
could measure length to get a sense of position, and now we can only guess
based on thickness"; I find this no different. The solution then was to think
of a way to intuitively incorporate that need into the codex, not to give up
on the codex and hang on to scrolls.

------
jvandonsel
Sometime in the future ebooks will inevitably abandon the codex paradigm
completely. For example, most e-readers today still present text in the form
of pages that require turning. This is a familiar model for book readers, but
is a bit awkward when reading linear text. One ends up flipping back and forth
between two pages (electronic or paper) when a complex sentence or paragraph
spans the page boundary.

A more natural model might be that of single continuous page (a la scroll),
maybe with controls to slide the text up a bit as you read. Of course this
model is available on the web and on platforms like Adobe, but the hardware
readers (Kindle, Nook) still use the page paradigm.

~~~
Fargren
This is for battery performance reasons, not because it's familiar to book
readers. An e-ink display only needs to consume battery when the image it's
displayng changes. If you scroll, you refresh the whole page and you only show
up one new line of text. For the same cost of batery, you can turn the page
and display a whole new page. Scrolling is ridiculously wasteful on e-ink.

