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Comment by witrak | Hacker News Reader

Highly biased opinions... What about articles where access to all parts is needed, like scientific articles, manuals, reports, etc? And for the general public too, at least part of readers are able to concentrate on reading much longer than thru a couple of paragraphs.

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That's not infinite scroll. That's just a large page.

No, a book is not a large page.

Counter examples can be found all over the internet (e.g. many gnu manuals have the option to show all information in a single HTML page, quite a few Gutenberg books are in a single HTML file).

(I'm wondering if you think the objection is to scrolling, it's not, there is a difference between a long page with scroll bars that give an indication on how far you are on the page, and infinite scrolling where the page gets longer each time you read the end of the page)

Obviously you can make a single large page. We don't call that a book, but a page. A book is a collection of pages.

From dictionary, book: "a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers."

A book page is clearly a different concept to a web page, despite the similar name. I'm not sure what your point is.

i bet it would be theoretically feasible to take each individual page of a book and perform some chemical process on them such that you join the bottom of a given page with the top of the next one on chemical level, in which case, a book certainly can be a single page. really, all books are just a single conceptual page split at given boundaries to give the impression of structure.

no, I didn't say that you can turn a book into a single page exactly. I said that you can bind the pages of a book together in such a way that it would be one long, continuous page. rather, i said that conceptually, a book can be a single page, and beyond that I also went on to clarify that a book is nothing more than a single page split at arbitrary locations to give the impression of structure.

if there were a single piece of paper long enough to hold the entirety of a book, and it were written out on that page, would that make it any less of a book? it may not be one in the sense that it is no longer bound together, but at the same time, in the former example the pages were bound together by some chemical process into one monolithic page; the only thing missing is a cover to hold it together, though I have seen college textbooks come as just loose leaf paper that one has to bind themselves but that's still a "book" prior to binding.

also: what if a story or some such were to be written on a scroll? just because it doesn't fit the precise literal definition of what a book is, doesn't mean it doesn't contain the same semiotic substance as "book" and as such doesn't mean that it automatically isn't one. but maybe im just being pedantic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You said it yourself, you can turn a book into a page. It won't be a book anymore. It is a page.

Have you heard of hyper-links?

Using links or buttons would suck for a lot of use cases. Imagine what it would work like on your phone if you couldn't scroll through Twitter, but had to touch buttons.

Funny that you use Twitter as an example because infinity scrolling on Twitter is the reason the side is so unusable. Whenever you click an image/link or try to zoom in/out, you take the risk to lose your current scroll position.

? I have a touchscreen

Honestly scrolling on mobile gets me halfway to a repetitive stress injury, I’ll take a next button anyday

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