[maram]

>>The page turn animation was truly excellent.

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...

[lostmsu]

At some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?

[peterkelly]

I don't expect this will happen. There's a good reason why floppy disks are no longer used, but I would be surprised if physical books ever go away.

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.

[lxgr]

Sure, but how much closer to the physical book reading experience does a page flip animation really get us?

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.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

On the contrary, I much prefer reading from a tablet or a smartphone. Unlike printed books, they glow in the dark!

[Retric]

Glowing in the dark is as much a bug as a feature. Lit screens work best in a dark room, where a reading light is more pleasant when you pause reading to do something else.

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.

[real-dino]

I use a headtorch, and then end up staying awake for 2 hours after.

[Tagbert]

An e-ink reader does it better because the front lighting is less glaring and the overall image is more stable. It’s hard to get a phone screen to the right brightness level for reading in the dark, but an ereader will have a very dim front light that you only notice when the room is completely dark.

[kiririn]

Do any exist with warm colour temperatures? My kindle paperwhite is at least 6500k and basically unusable without an external light source

[terramex]

Kindle Paperwhite 5th gen has both amber and white LEDs and its color temperature can be adjusted. I don't know exactly what light temperature range it has but it feels very "warm" on maximum setting.

[obahareth]

Some of the ones from Onyx Boox have customizable cold/warm temperature sliders.

[tlavoie]

My Kobo Libra H2O has quite a warm backlight, with variable brightness. I don't recall if the colour temperature is adjustable however.

[NotACop182]

There is something about owning a book and having your own hard library. I love to do almost everything on the phone; news, tv, videos, Ect.

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.

[cokeandpepsi]

TBH I like the animation because it prevents accidental page flips for whatever reason

[spikeagally]

At some point. That point is a long long way away.

[lostmsu]

Are you sure? There's an entire generation of people born after 2000 who probably read more electronic books than physical ones.

[petilon]

User Interface that is easy to imagine as a physical object is easier to figure out. It doesn't matter if the user is familiar with the physical object being emulated on the screen. Because laws of physics are still applicable even if you haven't seen such a physical object in real life.

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.

[defaulter4now]

That's a cheap assumption without any data to back it up. What does the 3D animation cost in terms of CPU power?

[spikeagally]

I don’t have any data to back it up but I doubt that. Schools are still mostly using paper text books. And I reckon school libraries are still the main source of books for kids (who typically don’t have money to buy books). Family members who want to buy you a book as a gift, will do that on paper as gifting ebooks is trickier and less personal.

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.

[SanjayMehta]

College students here are almost all using PDFs on their laptops.

Especially engineering.

Tried conducting an open book test this year and was met with consternation. Had to go with an open laptop test instead.

[s3p]

Difference of opinion. Others may believe that point is today.

[spikeagally]

They’d be wrong. It’s not opinion. Paper books are clearly not anachronistic currently.

[tim333]

"Print books out-sell eBooks 4-to-1" - recent data.

[gnicholas]

True. But piracy is a big issue, and it exclusively happens digitally. I wonder what the numbers would look like if you factored in pirated ebooks/etextbooks.

[lostmsu]

In numbers or in revenue?

[musicale]

The new animation hurts my brain also.

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.