Apple changed how reading books works in iOS 16
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It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.
The HW is already needed for games.
There are lots of things to dislike about feature and size bloat, but this is among the worst possible examples.
Is it the reflectance/emission? Perhaps, Kindles are better than iPads; is it the resolution? Perhaps, retina iPads are better than pre/non-retina tablets; is it the tactile sensation? Perhaps, I find matt paper better than the gloss of many magazines, and the new Paperwhite is half way between on that score.
Perhaps I'm just remembering good times from my childhood, and skeuomorphisms are a way to catch that.
But no, a 3D animation like this is not the reason why apps are bloated. Other similar animations were smooth on a 450 MHz G3.
Also, the lighting looks fake. Even on good modern screens, there's a billboard feeling I can't ignore. I think that's your reflectance/emission point; it's not light reflecting on an object like literally everything you look at, it's an object blasting light at you trying to make it look real.
Now all of a sudden people finally realized that reading dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day is a shitty way to work, and vendors have backpedaled clumsily to offering a hard-coded "dark mode." But we already had an even-better solution: Windows let users set up their own system-wide color scheme, from Windows 3.1 through XP or even Vista. Any properly-constructed application would inherit the system colors for various on-screen elements and guarantee legibility. If you wanted to change the look of all your applications, you had one central place to do it. And if, as a developer, you wanted to guarantee a color scheme, all you had to do was make sure you overrode both foreground and background colors.
But Microsoft actually REMOVED that capability just in time for it to become desirable to more people than ever. Brilliant.
What's the difference? I've seen it repeated over and over and it never made any sense. If your screen is too bright compared to the environment, turn it down. The only practical difference seems to be uniformity - screens are much more uniform. No shadows, no dependency on the angle to the light source etc. Which is... great?
Active displays can be fatiguing for a variety of reasons, including brightness as you mention, but also the "unnatural" light spectrum.
Also, of course, blue light is believed to affect your circadian rhythm, so can cause disturbances after sundown. Most ebook readers have adjustments for this though.
Beyond that, I'd speculate that screens don't retain as much contrast when you turn their brightness down, compared to physical materials presenting similar "brightness" under ambient light. But really that's just some talking out the ass with no research to back it up.
For me it’s the exact opposite. I read a lot, mostly on my Kindle Oasis (139 titles this year so far according to Kindle Insights) and on the very rare occasion I read a paper book I’m reminded how annoying reading paper books is.
There are several issues with reading paper books:
First, the physical format, long books are thick and unwieldy. There is no comfortable way to read in bed. You either read laying on your back, holding the book above your face, which is uncomfortable to hold and tires your arms. When laying on your side the fact that books fold in the middle is super annoying, if you open the book at a 90° angle you can only really read one page and you have to turn yourself after every page. Holding it open fully also isn’t comfortable.
Next, there is the light issue. Paper only reflects light, meaning you always need an external light source. It’s much easier for me to immerse myself in a story reading in a dark room. Another issue with external light is that you have to orient yourself relative to the light source. Again, when reading in bed this is a problem if your light source is on your nightstand. If you turn to a different side you are lying in your own shadow.
Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment. Getting my hands on them in the first place would also be a problem. I can browse books online and find something I’m in the mood for right now and be reading it in 30 seconds instead if waiting days for delivery. I can binge through a series in days instead of weeks.
No, I really don’t want to go back to dead tree books and I can’t believe people put up with the inconvenience when there is no longer a need to.
last time i read a trade paper, the weight and lighting issues dominated any of the pleasant tactility of paper.
that said, i do miss the random-access characteristics of physical books: being able to have fingers between multiple pages to skip between sections and the ability to quickly visually binary-search for something. these seem solvable but require some master UI work
Oh thank goodness. I'm not sure how many more years my Kindle 4 has in it...
The other side of that is discoverability. So much of my fondness for reading today comes from the fact that I grew up in a house packed with books, practically a shelf in every room, and as a child it was so easy to just pick a book off the shelf and start reading.
The Kindle Oasis is my preferred way to read now, but if when I was a child my dad had read everything electronically, would I be reading (e)books today, or would I have never read enough casually to develop a love of the medium?
That’s why in 2022 I keep the bookshelves in my house overflowing.
Attention to detail. Craftsmanship.
Caring...
The point of it is: they were going to do a skeuomorphic animation, and they put the effort in to do it right. It's a level of polish that I really appreciate, even though it isn't really necessary for anything.
It is one of the best, if not the best, way of letting users know what their action will lead to, and of letting them explore the range of available actions.
By behaving similarly to a well-know interface, it simplifies discovery, lowers friction and reduces frustration.
So when smartphones and touch interfaces were new to most people, behaviours such as this one were major, although nearly invisible, product features.
Now? Yes, it mostly isn’t necessary to anything, but it was nice.
It's not possible with public UIKit / CoreAnimation APIs. Those only support homogenous linear transformations (i.e. 4x4 matrix). You may try using the private CAMeshTransform API to achieve such an effect: https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/
iPhone iOS design used to be excellent. Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016: “ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.”
https://medium.com/@maram5/could-the-iphone-sales-decline-be...
To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.
Especially engineering.
Tried conducting an open book test this year and was met with consternation. Had to go with an open laptop test instead.
The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.
Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.
I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.
In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...
I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.
Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what but the flat design seems charmless compared to the Forstall-era skeuomorphic design. And the vanilla sameness and uniformity makes it harder to distinguish things. It reminds me a bit of shelving books by size and color rather than by content.
I recently noticed a bunch of electric street lamps that are clearly modeled on gaslamps - they appear to have little chimney vents as well as wide pipes for the nonexistent gas, and they seem designed to shield the LED/CFL/etc. fixture from wind and rain. Mostly non-functional design elements, and I've only seen a few dozen actual gas streetlamps in cities, but I still find them charming.
Maybe if enough people ask for it, it might come back as an option.
THIS is the real problem. Books (or music, movie, whatever) tied to one specific platform, without any chance to migrate somewhere else - somewhere where is more comfortable/convenient for you.
Ownership of data should be included in service, but rarely is.
Still, signing into public devices with your private credentials and data is a bad idea. What if they kick you out of the store or take away the device your were toying with before you manage to wipe/reset it?
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Being tied to a specific platform is unacceptable.
Libreture maintains a list of such bookstores [1].
That being said, I've used Kindle for years because it's online etc. They have had this same feature for years on their mobile versions so I don't get how this was a killer feature of Books.
[EDIT] Two key real-book-reading behaviors this enabled, that a non-interactive page flip animation (which I personally find a ton worse than no animation) does not:
1) You could "play" with the corner and edge of the page while reading. Great for fidgeters, and analogous to what some of us do when reading real books.
2) You could start to flip the page as you were nearing the end of the current page.
But the animation is disabled by default and lately I've stuck with the regular sliding animation because it's faster and much less obtrusive. It also lets you start turning the page as you're reading the last line.
Apple has an intense culture of dogfooding, so it would surprise me very much if someone in a leadership position didn't experience the new page-flipping animation, much less explicitly approve its design.
That’s not really a change you miss if you do any QA of that app at all. And if it was missed that’s even worse for Apple than if it was a conscious choice.
No one has ever designed a physical book that works anything like the new page-turning approach, and you have to believe there's a reason for that.
But what I could imagine is that it fell out of product oversight and an engineer just came along and said "well that's a really complicated piece of code, I don't want to maintain that, I'll replace it with something simple", and nobody pushed back because this isn't a high-priority feature any more
At least iOS lets you change the font size for each application independently, which is a feature that I make heavy use of. I like larger fonts, but sometimes this results in text being truncated too early, and being able to selectively reduce the font size makes it feasible to have a larger default font size. For whatever reason this is not possible on Android, and changing the font size takes several seconds to kick in, so even manually boosting the font size for certain cases via a shortcut or automation is annoying.
Then it is non-skeuomorphic.
And they have been removing it bit by bit since they kicked out Scott Forstall.
I don’t think he’s actually working anywhere that could be bought, though.
Except with a stack of cards (or pages) the bottom page would not be moving. The visual is more reminiscent of some sort of assembly / processing line.
It was also slow, interrupting my reading flow. When I'm reading something exciting, I always start reading at a fast pace, and the interruption in reading while I turn each page feels like a video constantly stopping to buffer.
Both of these factors apply to physical books to some extent, but much less so – mainly because you can fit much more text on a book page than on a phone screen, and also because you can turn a physical page quite fast.
Slow page turns are also the reason I don't like ePaper readers. In that case it's not an animation slowing things down, but the ePaper refresh time.
Anyway, this is why I used to use the iOS Kindle app instead of Apple Books (née iBooks) – because the Kindle app uses a simple horizontal sliding animation (similar to Libby in the article) that is faster and doesn't obscure content. However, Apple Books eventually added a mode that removes pages altogether in favor of a continuous vertical scroll, which I now use.
I just briefly tried Apple Books' new page turning animation, and I definitely prefer it, though it's still a bit slow and I still prefer the vertical scroll. Perhaps the change was made with users like me in mind.
Which is not to say I'm happy with the old animation being taken away from users who liked it! I appreciate that my sensitivity to interruptions is idiosyncratic, and the old animation certainly had superior aesthetics. Ideally it would be a setting.
My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take over the performance critical code in Objective C for the page flipping animation.
Is it technically possible? Yes. is it easy? Maybe not.
1 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-...
Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better.
Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already.
The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
It's pretty easy and basically required to do anything useful if you need to support iOS 14, or god forbid, iOS 13
I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.
The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
Every browser nowadays can imitate page flip with CSS only.
Oh boy, if you think dedicated devices don't have the same problem of frustrating updates, then I got some bad news for you. I still remember how annoyed I was when Kindle update added recommendations (=ads) on my home menu.
I am concerned that it might break, because none of the newer Kindle work like the old one. It has button, a non-touch display and isn't backlit, all things I consider must have feature, or non-features. Personally I don't understand why they didn't just stop development at that point and just lowered prices as the components became less and less expensive.
- Internal Apple design presentation
/s
Books also often put some or all of that info at the top of every page or every other page, while many reader apps hide it most of the time, I suppose to save space for body text.
Such a tiny feature, but since I've turned it on it has nudged me to read hours more each week.
Apple doesn't even allow this kind of transition in their own slide decks, at least they didn't when I worked there.
This new animation breaks even the basic the mental model of a “page”. If the goal is to do away with skeuomorphism, I’d much rather have a simple push/slide animation without any shadow or fancy transition . Want the title permanently in view, put it in a top bar or floating element.
But then the window doesn't move with the card that it was cut from, so I realize I was mistaken. There is no window or magical scissors. Instead, I have momentarily acquired x-ray vision but it only works on part of the card.
That iPad has a more responsive keyboard than my iPad Pro.
The old page flip animation was always distracting to me. I haven’t used the new one.
My only complaint with the iOS 16 version of Books is that it's way, way too easy to double tap a bookmark into existence. I've gotten good at ignoring it. Kinda like it's too easy to create a section of highlighted text on the Kindle app. Both of these are probably just a case of 'holding it wrong' but whatever.
That or crank the font size way app.
That being said. It’s beyond me why the mac version only allows for a paginated view.
I strongly prefer the continuous scrolling mode from the Kindle.
On further thought, any kind of UI animation bothers me. I don't need the computer to waste my time, I just want it to do what I told it.
When I’m reading a real book I don’t see some absurd ‘scrolling over page turn’ - I just turn the page. It’s over in the blink of an eye, and isn’t some “joyful” imaginative experience, at all.
If you didn't care for it, you could ignore it, it was fast. But it showed that the designers of iBooks had cared about it being an experience of reading books.
The new animation is just... weird. It's not an actual thing and makes no sense. It doesn't even look like you're yeeting the top page out of the pile since the bottom one moves.
The thing that prompts me to comment is that this feels like yet another place where the "artfulness" of software is getting optimized out of things. Whatever any of us thinks of the animation, it was clearly the result of clever work by the team putting out the app. The two ways of turning the page give a different feel and have a different character.
I think how apps feel - and the engineering behind making them feel a certain way - often does not get its due. I think we, as an industry, should do more to celebrate people doing things "the hard way" because it's nice - and not dismiss it as "absurd."
Why couldn't they have an option to keep the old animation? In 2022, it should be that simple, but of course...
It's not that I loved the old animation, but rather that I can't stand the current one. It's like I'm rotating a deck of cards, taking one off the top of the pile and putting it underneath. Not very pleasant to me, and also not an animation style I've seen used in any other book apps to my knowledge. I wonder why that is?
No, it’s not.
Not to be confused with the time the publishers sued Amazon over providing speech to text in Audible. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/15/audible-settle...
The basic features they butchered/implemented for the "front end to revenue stream":
- jarring animation that cannot be turned off
- scrolling is now relegated to a weird small control in settings that has no relation to the actual book you're reading
- "lock orientation" locks orientation in portrait mode
- accessing table of contents is now three taps
- accessing font settings is now three taps
- table of contents + scrolling + searchig + themes + scroll lock + bookmarks ... all of that is accessed through a tiny gray icon that is nearly indistinguishable from surrounding text. Also, this icon is unique, and has never been used anywhere in iOS or MacOS
- closing a book is now a tiny gray x that is almost indistinguishable from the text
All this passed design -> design approval -> engineering managers -> programmers -> qa -> launch check lists.
By the way, when it launched in iOS 16, the close icon and the "kitchen sink" icon would always pe present, they only fixed it a month or two later.
Yup. This is the state of a "frontend to the revenue stream". Done and approved by people who have never read a single book on iOS (and MacOS where it was also butchered), or perhaps have never read a single book in their life, period.
Edit: their animation is also "least effort" attempt: they hide page numbers when animation, then it takes up to two seconds for them to reappear.
Although I've used Macs for decades and iPhones since day one, I typically purchase ebooks on third-party platforms. If I buy an Android tablet, a non-Apple computer, or some other device that hasn't been invented yet, I don't want to be locked out of my prior purchases.
Exactly. I try to get off active displays at least 2 hours before going to sleep, which is also when I like to read.
In some way currently I actually regard that as an advantage – iTunes might have its foibles, but the hard split between e.g. Music and Podcasts that happened on Mac definitively isn't something I'm looking forward to.
That's because I've found the Podcasts section of iTunes actually quite useful for also managing my collection of radio comedy, e.g. to get the nice at-a-glance listened/unlistened episode display. With unified iTunes it's simply a matter of adding those files (which are only rarely native podcasts and usually have been scrounged together from all sorts of various sources) to my music library and then manually setting the media type to "Podcast", but on a Mac post-split-up that no longer works, and the successor Podcasts app apparently allows no manual file management.
So I'd either have to manually hack the database, or more likely set up a fake local podcasts server, or just give up entirely and switch to something else (which might still mean having to set up a fake podcasts server anyway in order to sync the episodes to my phone).
At least on Windows iTunes update and general compatibility aren't as directly tied to the OS itself as on Mac, so if push came to shove, I could just keep on using iTunes – the only slight annoyance would be if compatibility with the iTunes store would eventually break…
Someone in Apple HQ must find the old HIG and make it mandatory.
- Google Play Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOJ15ysPsRo
- eReader Prestigio: https://youtu.be/YdNCElSHJbE?t=79
This might not sound like much, but Books is unfortunately laden with weird bugs that don’t exist in normal Safari. They managed to fix the one I reported about srcset not working for images (it just didn’t display anything) but flex / grid display with 100vh is completely broken, and there’s a bunch more minor things like broken page-break functionality. And the debugging cycle currently is to make changes, repackage the book, reload the book in Books, and hope for the best.
1. This is the person who buys books from iTunes.
2. Despite deploying their own words to a scroll, the last person buying books on iTunes laments losing a pointless* animation.
* the animation doesn’t semantically enrich the reading experience since it lacks the feeling of the rest of the pages. It merely imitates the paper book experience that might be technically satisfying to see performed once, but is otherwise a perfect example of kitsch.
The default leading in Apple Books is decent, but I switch fonts at a whim and many require adjustments. And nothing is more irritating than copying an excerpt from a book and having to remove the extra text about the title of the book, the book’s author and the copyright information.
Plus the way Yomu exports highlights is really interesting.
My only complaint with the previous version was that it was too easy for an errant swipe to create a highlight. This has been replaced by every other swipe being interpreted as a double tap, creating a bookmark on every single page.
I hate the era we're in now of changing software to be worse just so they can say they changed it.
It's gotten to the point where any announcement of a software update gets an initial reflexive negative reaction from me, as these days they're more often steps backwards than improvements.
Am I the only one thinking the new animation actually looks better? The page seem to quickly fade away with less distractions and might enable to focus more on the text flow.
If anything knowing the interface evolved is actually encouraging me to give it another go.
It's fun for fidgeting but I personally find it way more visually distracting than the new behavior.
Edit: Think I figured it out - looks like PDFs still have the page turn animation on iOS but epubs are using the new animation
This is what a monoculture gets us. We need more competition, and hardware to be open so we can get even more competition (also free competition).
It took me a while to warm up to "flat design", but now I can't ever see myself (or the industry) going back. By allowing the interface to recede, you allow the content to shine. Generally you want to focus on the document, the photo, the text, the movie -- not the controls around it.
But a simile comes to mind: The whizz-bang interfaces were like illuminated manuscripts. Beautiful. Works of art. Literal human artistic treasures.
But when I’m reading an email, I do not need dragons curled around drop caps.
I might actually bother to read such an email.
Our minds are pretty good at focusing on important stuff. We don't need white margins for that. We can focus on important stuff even with non-white margins. And those non-white margins might actually bring some joy when you can't focus anymore, because brain focus is finite.
There's no way for industry not going back. It'll go back. It always did. We move in spiral. We just need to completely forget how good skeuomorphic interfaces were, so companies will sell those again. Probably executed much better.
Then I must be GPT model because those non-functional things are way too distracting.
Jokes aside, I hated the page animation. It was amusing for the first minute but it felt weird to interact with it. Sticky is the only word that comes to mind, but not quite that. Glad it's gone.
Design is about solving human problems and helping humans accomplish things, not about how it looks.
...for example, apple mouse is the worst product on the market. But nooo.. apple zombies won't even think of using anything else ....does the iphone video/cam recorder even in the 2022 have a pause button? i remember it did not have it in 2020 yet in all other phones had it 10 years because you need it
Please tell me you were being sarcastic. I’m really afraid you’re not.
And it's not bad to appreciate a small thing.
So I think that sentiment is fine. It's not one of the last things the author liked, it's one of the last things they liked about their phone.
It's very minor, but minor nice things were all the phone had going for it...
A decade ago I used to view Steve Jobs as an a designer that was a little too full of himself, today I see him as an extinct breed of people that had a vision and didn't compromise in the name of revenue and cutting corners.
Many engineers and managers nowadays think good, opinionated and well-crafted product are a waste of time and money. Shipping early is the only metric that matters, and the various Tim Cooks in charge are a sign of the times.
Dog-shit usability compared to a desktop computer, massive brain-draining time-sinking cheap dopamine-spiking apps which add virtually zero value to the world, 99% of which have no real reason of being an "app" in the first place.
Phones are horrific.
Lord I wish we could go back to the days of pay a flat one time fee and own the dang software so I don't get "improvements" shoved down my throat
Old man rant over
What you can't do is downgrade once you've found that you're not happy with upgrade. That's the most bizarre Apple thing. Unless you can jailbreak. Not sure if it works nowadays, back in days I was very happy to downgrade to iOS 6 with jailbreak on my iPhone 4S.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-releases-ios-1...
Ideally, there should be a system where security patches are installed, but anythingv what is optional and reversible
I like it in theory but supporting it can be unwieldy, especially for design-led orgs that like to tinker and introduce changes a lot (not dissing, just not my preference). Like how many versions and combinations do you support? I've worked in an app company once, and supporting web, iOS, and Android was somewhat annoying enough. Can't imagine adding in support for old versions.
OTOH it could force more deliberation and discipline on the part of product teams before going all-in on whatever shiny new object caught their eye this month
In the case of e-ink e-readers you also face the issue that their screen updating tech is really better suited to full page replacements then line- or pixel-level scroll, though of course that doesn't apply to Apple's devices.
I do use ereaders and if I travel for some time I'll use it..
I gave up on e-ink readers a few years ago and donated a couple of them. I am reading books in eletronic format on iPhones. It's just more practical, I don't need to carry a second and usually larger device with me, and ... I don't need an external light when it's too dark to read. Plus, the newer iPhones with OLED displays are pretty good for reading.
The ability to fiddle with page corners, half-flip pages then flip them back, that kind of thing, made it much more like reading a real book, and it was my favorite way to read ebooks, followed at a distance by e-ink readers, and then, very distantly, by every other non-e-ink way to read ebooks that wasn't Apple Books.
Not joking that the page flip animation was the thing that made the Apple version far and away my favorite way to read ebooks. The new animation doesn't just lose that quality, it's also notably bad even among the all-some-degree-of-bad animations of reader apps in general (not counting pre-16 Apple Books).
I understand that it's useful to sometimes have access to books on a computer, phone or table, but that's for professional use in my mind, and not a replacement for a physical book in the same sense a device with e-ink displays are.
Even if you read on the iPad, I don't fully understand why you'd want the page animations anyway. Still the complain in the article is weird, just accept it and move on, if you're waiting for Apple to switch back I feel your going to wait a very long time.