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.
The very first ereader I had was on an HP95lx maybe 30 years ago. It scrolled. Paging wasn't an option and that made sense because in those days, before most people heard of Windows or Macs, computer screens scrolled. That's just how computer screens worked.
That's still true of pretty much anything except ereaders. Browse the web and you scroll, you don't page, except in some special situations where the site makes it look like paging so you'll see more ads. Use a word processor or a spreadsheet and you scroll.
The majority of the ereading apps on the Palm Pilot, where ereading first began to be popular, scrolled. A few paged. Actually I think the majority of the paging ones were the ones provided by book sellers and even a lot of those scrolled.
Probably because books page, today's ereaders do. Or maybe the reason has more to do with e-ink's limitations and apps on LCD try to work like e-ink. For whatever reason, apps tend to page and they put a lot of technology into making paging as impressive as possible.
When I'm reading and I reach the end of a paragraph I'll scroll so the next paragraph is near the top of the screen. In most cases that lets me see the entire paragraph. When I finish that, either that paragraph or the next one if they're short, I scroll down again just as much as I want to and it makes me feel like I'm not losing any context. If I have to page, all the text is gone and I have a new context.
Worse than that, on my Kindle near the bottom of the page my finger is poised to swipe and I have to focus just a little bit of attention on not jumping the gun, which I kind of tend to do if I don't stop myself, and that takes a little bit of my attention away from the book.
Granted these are small things. I do enjoy reading on my Kindle. But even though these things are small, they're there and I enjoy scrolling more because I can do that with practically no distraction from reading. My mind is on the reading and if I scroll early it's simply no problem.
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.
I doubt if Gutenberg invented pages although he may have. More likely that grew out of the need to keep paper small centuries before Gutenberg. But the early printing presses couldn't do anything except create individual pages. So we were stuck with them. And scrolls were probably unweildy.
But computers can not only overcome that difficulty, scrolling is more natural to them.
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
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.
The very first ereader I had was on an HP95lx maybe 30 years ago. It scrolled. Paging wasn't an option and that made sense because in those days, before most people heard of Windows or Macs, computer screens scrolled. That's just how computer screens worked.
That's still true of pretty much anything except ereaders. Browse the web and you scroll, you don't page, except in some special situations where the site makes it look like paging so you'll see more ads. Use a word processor or a spreadsheet and you scroll.
The majority of the ereading apps on the Palm Pilot, where ereading first began to be popular, scrolled. A few paged. Actually I think the majority of the paging ones were the ones provided by book sellers and even a lot of those scrolled.
Probably because books page, today's ereaders do. Or maybe the reason has more to do with e-ink's limitations and apps on LCD try to work like e-ink. For whatever reason, apps tend to page and they put a lot of technology into making paging as impressive as possible.
When I'm reading and I reach the end of a paragraph I'll scroll so the next paragraph is near the top of the screen. In most cases that lets me see the entire paragraph. When I finish that, either that paragraph or the next one if they're short, I scroll down again just as much as I want to and it makes me feel like I'm not losing any context. If I have to page, all the text is gone and I have a new context.
Worse than that, on my Kindle near the bottom of the page my finger is poised to swipe and I have to focus just a little bit of attention on not jumping the gun, which I kind of tend to do if I don't stop myself, and that takes a little bit of my attention away from the book.
Granted these are small things. I do enjoy reading on my Kindle. But even though these things are small, they're there and I enjoy scrolling more because I can do that with practically no distraction from reading. My mind is on the reading and if I scroll early it's simply no problem.
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.
I doubt if Gutenberg invented pages although he may have. More likely that grew out of the need to keep paper small centuries before Gutenberg. But the early printing presses couldn't do anything except create individual pages. So we were stuck with them. And scrolls were probably unweildy.
But computers can not only overcome that difficulty, scrolling is more natural to them.
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