Feature: Tilt Scrolling!

One of the most contentious subjects in ebook design is page flow. We’ve been working with text online for a long time, and even before you get into ebooks, there’s a whole range of options.

Just take a look at the way newspapers and magazines display articles online.

Many newspapers and magazines insist on splitting up long articles into separate pages, and there are a couple of reasons for this. The first benefits the reader: it’s a lot easier to bookmark a page in a long article and come back to the same place in that article if it’s split over several pages. The second, which benefits the publisher, is that a single article gets more page impressions, and – in some cases – more ad revenue. We’ve always been proponents of putting the reader first, so for short and medium-length articles, we always advocate single-page display, and we think that even for longer articles, readers should have the option of viewing the whole thing on a single page. (For example, see how this article at nytimes.com is paginated, with an option to display on a full page).

We do understand the pressures publishers are under to monetise their content though, so with Granta.com, we paginated articles, and subscribers are given the option to view the whole thing on a single page. Likewise with the Golden Notebook Project, pagination allowed far more focussed attention to be given to the text by the readers who were commenting closely on it.

eBook Pagination

With ebooks, however, there’s no need to do this – and attempts to do so often smack of a wrong-headed desire to recreate the physical book with little thought to the affordances of the new format. Many of the complaints about the Kindle and Sony Reader centre on the delay of page flipping, which is an unfortunate necessity of e-ink devices, but which has also been implemented in many iPhone and other readers (like classics2go). It’s much like those “page-flip” books and magazines you find on the web, which needlessly attempt to recreate the experience of a physical artefact with a load of Flash and fiddly interactions (e.g.). Man, we really don’t like those.

With Enhanced Editions, chapters are displayed as one continuous text, meaning there’s no waiting to flip the page every 20 or 30 lines. In this context, pagination is a hangover from the physical book, and wholly unnecessary – just think of Jack Kerouac typing ‘On The Road’ on one continuous roll of paper.

This also means that resizing and altering the text has no effect on the layout of the book, and our paragraph-level bookmarking and full-text search means it’s easy to return to the same point in the story, regardless of pagination. It’s also much more accessible.

Tilt Scrolling

Finally, there’s the ultimate iPhone benefit: tilt-scrolling. Scrolling is of huge benefit to readers, but it’s very hard to get the speed right automatically. The iPhone’s accelerometer (the bit of the device that knows which way it is facing) means that with a flick of the wrist, you can move the page up and down at a variable speed you feel comfortable reading at.

We first saw tilt scrolling implemented perfectly by Marco Arment’s glorious Instapaper apps, one of the first inspirations for Enhanced Editions. We even asked Marco to build Enhanced Editions for us, but he was too busy.

A year on, we’ve found that every page we read on an iPhone needs to have both tilt-scrolling, and rotation lock. Hopefully you’ll agree – but if you don’t, you can just turn them off.