Back when I first bought my e-ink Nook I kept trying to put into words
everything I was thinking about ebooks as a concept. There was always
something nagging at me about the format and I couldn't exactly place
it, though I knew it had something to do with the "page " metaphor.
Now that I'm reading a couple books on my full tablet, I think I'm
realizing the issue more: "pages" make no sense to an ebook. My problem
before was that they DO make sense for current e-ink devices, since they
update so slowly and can't handle scrolling well.
Books have pages because that's the format that was convenient for the
medium. When I'm reading a novel on a computer screen, why can't I just
endlessly scroll? It's annoying to have to "flip the page"... *there is
no page*.
I understand the desire to keep page numbers to compare with the
physical book, but that's also part of the problem. Since you can adjust
type size and other elements in e-readers, it might take you several
"next page" to advance to the next displayed page number... it's all very
arbitrary for the format. An e-reader "next page" is actually a "next
screen" command... which works like the "Page Down" key on a keyboard...
Luckily, this is something that can be addressed in the reader without having to alter the books themselves. Now if I could get someone at Barnes and Noble to add an "infinite scroll" option to their Android reader, perhaps with some sort of "scroll lock" feature to prevent accidental scrolling...
Of course, this still assumes that a "book" is a single-directional flow of text in one giant progression, which is barely less shortsighted than forcing the page metaphor in the first place. Ultimately, "e-books" can and will be more like websites, with internal cross-referencing, and large scrolling "pages" that may (or may not) progress in a fixed order one after another. For example, it might make sense to break apart each chapter in a novel into separate sections. Or how about one long epic story following multiple characters, where you choose *which* characters to follow, and you see only the appropriate chunks?
Oooh. That one's good.
