Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll

By far my favorite way to read content on a screen is using Tofu http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/ which presents columns (of user-preferred width, font, hyphenation & justification, and leading) of text, and then scrolls column-by-column left and right. It’s especially nice when two or more people are trying to read from the same screen, because occasional scrolling of a whole column directly horizontally is much less disruptive than arbitrary amounts of scrolling down a page. On wide computer displays, it is a significantly better use of screen real estate than single-column web pages, which should stick to a measure (width) of not much more than about 60 characters to be readable.

Anything longer than a page or two that I plan to read on a screen gets copied and pasted into Tofu.

Edit: note that there’s a (quick) slide animation with scrolling in Tofu which helps maintain the impression of a single continuous surface, but there are no gratuitous animated flipping page corners.

infinite scroll is mystery meat anyway. It breaks the standard affordance of the scroll bar -- that the length of the scroll bar reflects the total length of the page. One of those cases where trying to get clever just results in frustrated users (me) because of unexpectedly changing an interaction that otherwise would be taken for granted.

I'm on the side of less eye candy more speed. I see the page flip as nothing more than eye candy, and would rather do without it.

Alas, I was expecting hard data to support his statement, rather than a mere opinion. I prefer Stanza over iBooks precisely because I hate page flips.

But with infinite scroll, how does the "flipping between 1 column and 2 columns on the go" work? Do we read down the left column and then go up to the right? And how do we know where we are if we switch back to 1 column.

Of course, we can simply drop the facility to switch but I am curious if the two can work together in a usable way.

I generally like page flips, like reading a PDF page by page instead of scrolling continuously. But the downside is that generally page-flipping is coupled with fixed layout. And usually there's too much text on a single page, making the font absurdly small.

The good side about scrolling is that I can choose whatever font size I want and the page just grows as necessary while I can still scroll up and down. On the other hand it's a bit more difficult to locate yourself or jump around in a big chunk of scrolling text. PgDn/PgUp is a kind of a page flip but usability-wise it's better to have a bit of margin on top and bottom, just like on a real paper page. Then you know where the page ends and where the next page begins, and you don't have to scan the lines to see if the browser scrolled 100% or left 3 lines visible from the previous position or what.

I think I would like best a solution where the content is paginated but it would be dynamically fitted onto a page whose size is the browser window size. It would only fit as much text of proper size on one page that nicely fits there. If I use a big font, then it's 20 lines; if I use a small font, it's 40 lines. But I would still get pages, maybe fewer or more. A page would have proper margins and I could reason about navigating back to something I read "ten pages ago".

Even on a phone, I suspect the interface and the content need to be in harmony so generalizations like this are a bit excessive.

And moreover, just about thing you view on the phone will be something people also view in another way - as a website or a paper magazine. It's aesthetically and economically justifiable to have the two-plus views be in something like harmony. Facebook's infinite scroll on the website seems clunky, yet it's somewhat logical to have a relation between website and iPhone app.

I came to a similar conclusion, but I think the flip always looks and feels a little off. I prefer the page slide like the NYTimes website optimized for Chrome. Not a continuous slide, but a slide from one page to the next.

Pagination is definitely better than manual scrolling, but I find iBooks' animation too visually fancy. The Kindle iPad app is better: it just slides the new page in.