2. Static text for focus on reading
I agree that emulating paper books in digital became weird long ago — Apple’s iBooks came right as a prime example of then-hated (and frequently misunderstood) skeuomorphism.
Though, some valuable bits are lost when going for fluid (aka reflowable, responsive) layouts. One of these is the spatial memory related to the layout. As in “It’s been on the bottom left! BUT WHAT!” while writing a test back in school. It works on paper, it works with PDF, but it’s gone once you create a normal web page. I don’t know what to do about this one — and I haven’t even try to read up some research yet.
Another bit is the focus that is lost when scrolling — reading while scrolling is just one tiny step from skimming. And it’s not only my impression — science connects scrolling (as mentioned previously) to lower reading comprehension. Hence, we wanted to have some kind of “page step” in next-book, but it’s a hard thing to do with a continuous text.
We tried various approaches to retain the benefits of “pagination” while staying true to web UI conventions. And we may have nailed it this time finally.
The idea has always been to avoid scrolling when focusing on reading so that you can continue on the first line when “finishing a page,” but when you need it, scrolling is there for you.
The first next-book prototype had two vertical stripes so that a reader could see the continuation of the text — we drew inspiration from the vanished practice of using “catchwords“. It originated as a tool for bookbinders, but readers found it useful too.
Later we dropped the top bar to make it less weird (even then, our team member Lukáš thought it’s an adblock-related bug in our first round of internal testing).
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