The Mechanic Muse: From Scroll to Screen

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.

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.