Quote:
Originally Posted by msundman
I hate that none of the e-book readers I've tried support overlaps when I "turn the page". My current reader's 150-200 ms page flips makes this less of an issue than would, say, a 2000 ms page flip of a sony reader. But still, why can't they have a user-specifiable number of rows of the next page visible at the bottom, and similarly at the top? Probably precisely because the makers of the software are so used to the limitation of page breaks that the feature just hasn't occurred to them. OTOH, they have seen webpages, which are completely pagesizeless, so they figured you can also have e-books be completely pagesizeless and have the text just scroll across the screen, one pixel/text line at a time (and at this time the observant ones start realizing how illogical it is to be talking about pages when everything's just one, long, scrolling page). That's the other extreme, and kinda inherits the limitations of that too, and I don't quite like that either.
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I agree that there are two intrinsically different models of how an e-reader should work, one is page based and the other is text stream based. Converting a document to PDF with a fixed page size (optimized for the target device) is the purest version of the page approach, and an unmodified web browser is at the other extreme. Actual readers are somewhere between these two poles, but most want to present the page model to the user even if it is not used internally. It has been mentioned in other threads that a good test is to try to goto the middle of a page somehow (e.g. search). If this ends up at the top of a page after all, then the reader isn't enforcing a fixed page layout for the document as a whole.
FBReader is a good example of a reader that does not enforce pagination, and it allows overlap between pages if you want (or not if you don't want). I also agree that overlap between pages could be implemented by a genuine paginating reader (e.g. this is in principle possible when converting to PDF), but I am not aware of one that does so.