Ebook navigation is a bit of a minefield: if you’ve used a Sony Reader, you’ll know how frustrating it is to have to hop forwards and backwards between pages, chapters, sections and the table of contents. That’s why we’ve built the simplest navigation we can into Enhanced Editions.
Every chapter is presented as one long continuous stream of text (there’s more about this in another blog post), with arrows at the top and bottom to skip quickly back and forth between chapters. At any time, you’re just a couple of taps away from the full table of contents, which breaks the book down into its constituent sections and chapters, and you can easily return to your place in the text either directly or via the bookmarks.
The real key here is Authorial intention vs. Ebook affordances, or to put it simply, what the author wanted you to read, combined with the advantages of electronic reading over traditional books.
Authors structure their books a certain way – with chapters and sections – because these have relevance to the story, and must be preserved. But beyond that, anything is possible, and with Enhanced Editions we’ve tried to focus on what makes the best experience for the reader.
After a long (very long) time spent using lots of reading apps and devices, we decided that a reader’s time is best spent reading rather than turning pages. And so that’s what we focused on.
And then we added tilt-scrolling.
