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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Do you have evidence to support your claim that the true problem is moving words? I'm really not convinced. I feel especially with OS X's inertial scrolling that I can naturally keep track of where I am in an article while scrolling, it has never bothered me.

This just feels like fancy pagination. I tried partially scrolling ahead as I was reading and it disoriented me further, because the upcoming text was showing up at the top, behind where my eyes were, replacing the old text. This is confusing and not better.

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Have you ever tried reading a web page over a person's shoulder while they occasionally scroll up and down? It's really jarring (though turning on Firefox's "smooth scrolling" helps.)

I'm not sure that I like the results of this experiment, but I completely understand the motivation behind it.

I'm not sure that's relevant, though, because someone else is controlling the scrolling according to what they are reading. That it interferes with your reading is unsurprising, and I don't think says much about the reading experience when you are in control.

my mom has trouble using computers because of the scrolling. i imagine it's something in the same category as how i can't read anything in a moving vehicle without getting a ginormous headache, but other people don't have trouble with it :|

Okay, but that's kind of a non-sequitur in reply to my comment, which was pointing out that you can't conclude much about reading-with-scrolling when someone else controls the scrolling.

Have you ever tried reading a book over someone's shoulder? Or a newspaper someone else is holding up in front of you? Most people have to reach out and grab it themselves before it's comfortable to read. I think it is just a motor/sight sync issue for most people.

In fact, speed readers generally move the words, because moving the eyes slow down your reading. You're basically blind during a saccade.

Just anecdotal but magicscroll.net is a pretty popular ebook reader. Though that might be inspite of the scrolling rather than because of it.

For everyone who doesn't like it immediately please try it for a few days if you're able. I'm working against decades of learnt behavior so I don't think you can judge it on immediate impressions.

I see. Well, it's a bold experiment and you're definitely thinking outside the box. Do you intend the user to scroll as they are reading, or to have them wait until they finish a page and scroll entirely over to the next? I find the former hard to get used to, and the latter is just pagination. So maybe I'm a bit confused on how exactly this is meant to be used.

If you use the extension or the main site ebook reader you can set it to scroll at a specific word per minute speed.

It works really well over long texts and often your screensaver will come on before you need to adjust anything.

It's normally best to set the speed to just slower than your natural speed, so that you don't feel that you're racing the line.

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