Quote:
Originally Posted by ratinox
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To elaborate:
A user interface should be simple and consistent. And almost as important: it should hide itself when it's not needed.
Do you need to see page numbers when actually reading a book? Do you need to see the title of the book, the chapter title or the author's name? No, you do not. Most likely you don't even look at these things when reading unless you're at the start or end of a page. So the best way to show these things is not to show them at all. They're a waste of screen real estate.
Maybe you want to see your progress. Maybe you want to note the position of a particularly pithy quote. Maybe you're recommending a book to a friend and they want to take a photograph so they can find it easily later. These are all things you would do when
not reading that book. Tap the screen to bring up a panel with a summary of the books metadata. Tap it again to make it go away.
So you want to find a particular spot in a book. Page numbers are actually semi-useless in print books for this unless your reference includes the specific edition. Page numbers are even less useful in ebooks because, as I repeat myself, they don't have pages. Even the much-praised ADE pages are simply an arbitrary number of characters which is meaningless unless they're used to reference the same edition elsewhere and, as I repeat myself again, they don't mean anything useful to the human unless you divide by the total number of "pages" and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Just display the percentage in the metadata summary.
On the other hand, ebooks are (usually) serarchable. If you're looking for a specific passage and know a few words (which are easier for humans to remember than numbers, by the way) then search, type, wait a few seconds if that much, and you have it.
To summarize: Don't display metadata unless the user specifically requests it. Throw out faux page numbers; use percentages from start of book and start of chapter. Maybe use graphical (progress bar) representations as well as numerical representations of this information. Implement a good search function.