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[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

For me, the inconsistence wold be to stay at that page. It swipes the page and, as it is the last, it closes the book, in the same way you close your book after the last page, and don't keep it open in your lap.

In theory, I could agree. There's some logic in making a page turn past the last one mark the book as read and return to the home screen. Let's not discuss whether one likes this behaviour or not.

My point now is that "trying to turn the last page" should not be considered a good indication of "the reader has finished the book". This is the software (developers) trying to be smart. There are a few circumstances where it fails, as already discussed. The action can happen without finishing the book, and the book can be finished without the action happening. It works most of the time and for simple cases, but when it doesn't it's annoying and may cause a small havoc (as in the reading the last endnote case, where the reading position is probably lost).

It's rather like the auto-correct feature of text processors... How many spurious capital letters have been created because of this?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Ruskie_it

Exactly this. I can't do what you ask me to, I don't do anything.
Not "I do something completely different which may, or may not be what you really wanted me to do".
One is the way "Unix" behaves, the latter is Windows/Mac style (I stick to this analogy because I have read you enough to know you will get the analogy).

Indeed; it is not a coincidence that I prefer linux and also prefer that^^ choice.

Oh no, Kindle is not better at all, from the usability point of view: simply replace "close the book" with "display that annoying popup".
On the contrary: I suspect there are way more people that at the end of the book want to go back to the shelf, rather than people that at the end want to let the world know how they rate that book (and only if it is not a sideloaded one). So we might argue Kindle does even worse. On the other hand, it's easier to "recover" from the unwanted popup: go back where you are is just a matter of tapping the X.

Yeah, neither is ideal but at least the Kindle doesn't change things (reading position etc.) unexpectedly.

[murg]

Originally Posted by Ruskie_it

Unfortunately, it's not matter of opinions in this case. Software interfaces theory and usability laws do not work that way. Either an interface does always the same thing responding to the same input, or it doesn't. That's consistency. Yours is not - sorry to say. As you say, "as it is the last it..." decides what the best behaviour would be, and acts accordingly, with a different action.
This might not be negative - in fact, you do like how it acts - but it is not consistent. As I said, this is not matter of preferences, these are just facts. So we're back to page 1: you may prefer the way kobo behaves, but that is not consistent.

Whoa...

There are no usability laws. And software interface theory changes every few years.

There is no reason that user interfaces don't react differently to different sections of the book. It is very reasonable to expect that doing the next page action will cause the software to go to the next page, unless you are on the last page, in which case the book will be exited and the normal book exiting logic will be followed.

According to your theory, there would be no real reason for a state machine, as every instance of an action would cause the same outcome.