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Originally Posted by barryem
I'm guessing this is the right group for this topic even though Android's Moon+ is the only scrolling reading app I'm currently aware of. But there have been other scrolling apps in other platforms in the past so I put it here. It won't hurt my feelings if it gets moved.
Anyway when I read an ebook on my phone I use Moon+ and I have it set to scroll manually. When I read on my Kindle or my Kobo, of course it pages. I prefer the Kindle to the phone overall but the phone is always with me and it's becomming more and more my reader of choice and a big part of that is because I can scroll.
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It sounds like that you don't use iOS devices. I use both Android and iOS devices for reading. iBooks, the standard reading app from Apple, has (manual) scrolling option. So does
BookMaster, the best reading app IMHO.
To me, paging and (manual) scrolling are complementary ways to read, depending on a number of factors, including screen size, font size, text or image, short or long, etc. If the hardware and software (app) are capable of supporting both, why not?
In the ancient days, people read in papyrus, parchment or bamboo scrolls. Paper books came later. Today we have computers acting as ebook readers. Technology has always played a crucial role, and historically the limiting role. (Remember that terminals connected to mainframes were once the state-of-the-art technology in mid 20-th century.)
There is no one right way to read. But there is one right way to write a good reading app--give the users a reasonable range of choices that the underlying hardware is capable of. To page or to scroll is definitely within this range of modern iOS and Android devices.
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From a programming perspective and probably a hardware perspective, although I'm a lot more familiar with programming, scrolling is far more efficient. It's a natural and simple process for a computer that uses very few CPU cycles compared to the far more complex paging process. That might not be true of e-ink at least from a hardware perspective but it might be. I've heard both ways on that but never really from anyone who's likely to be authoratative. I'm certainly not. I know very little about e-ink.
I'm going to make a wild guess based on more than a little programming experience that paging uses several thousand times as many CPU cycles as scrolling. I've written lots and lots of scrolling procedures in the early days of computer screens when that wasn't part of the OS yet. This was long before the days of micro-computers. I can't recall ever writing a paging procedure although I may have. I'm just not sure. So my guess is kind of a wild one. It might not be that bad. It probably is a lot worse when the page curls.
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Let's focus on modern day non e-ink devices for now. Compared with animation intensive games, or playing video clips, the CPU requirement for reading apps in general is not an issue.
However, there is a place that affects the user's perception of response time--realistic, fluid, following-your-finger-back-and-forth type of page curl animation (as exemplified by iBooks and BookMaster apps). This kind of page turn effect, though performed only once a while, sets the peak CPU (really the GPU) usage during a typical reading session.
For a while after iBooks first popularized the page curl effect on the first iPad in 2010, there was no Android devices capable of such smooth animation. Clearly, paging (with true page curl animation effect) is more "expensive" than (manual or auto) scrolling. But today we no longer have to be constrained by this technology limitation. Choose a device and an app that gives you the freedom of choice you deserve. Then you can switch the reading mode--paging or scrolling--as frequently as it suits you.
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What I'm hoping for in response to all this is some refutation. I'm sure a lot of people are going to say simply "I like paging better." and that's a reasonable argument but it doesn't refute what I've said. This is a smart forum full of smart people so let's have it. Why do you like paging more?
Barry
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Since you explicity asked for it, do you enjoy my refutation?
