On Paginated Text

The New York Times has a short piece on a Microsoft patent application for simulated page turns on a touchscreen device. I’d already seen the patent, and find it generally troubling that something so simple, easy to implement, but above all obvious, may find its way into anyone’s patent portfolio.

But the NYT piece pointed me in a direction that hadn’t caught my attention in the past couple of days. The focus turned to whether page turning is at all appropriate in a digital medium. Nick Bilton, the author of the NYT bit clearly expresses his preference for scrolling, and for good reason and backed with some experience. He writes that across a page flip, the reader’s eyes have to adjust to the new page, whereas in scrolling text the page adjusts to the reader. He also cites various other people’s perspectives in favor of scrolling, mostly focused on calling page flipping anachronistic. There was only one ill-represented voice from the opposing camp, the Design Dare blog.

What design dare mostly writes in that post is that if done right, page flips are preferable to scrolling, and additionally describes how to do page flips right. There’s an added disclaimer the post limits itself entirely to iBooks on the iPad, and does not dare make a stand on scrolling in general within this post. The writer’s points for a good flipping implementation are

1. Page flips must be fast
2. ‘’ shouldn’t be fancy
3. ’’ should be easy
4. ’’ should be reserved for the physical book metaphor (OK on iPad, not on iPhone)

His last few points are categorically different and closer to what I want to add to the general debate. With pagination, page layout is more easily preserved, and pages can be designed in a self-contained fashion, much to the benefit of readability. And that it’s not too confusing to “flip a page” and know you’re to start reading at the top left. And finally, he argues that it’s easier to keep your place in a paginated document. An errant gesture will only take you one page out of your way whereas an “ice cube on the counter slide” can scroll you well into unknown territory. I might add that this also happens even on a laptop with a poorly-placed click on a scroll bar

What I want to contribute here is an additional argument favoring pagination, and not so much page flipping itself, based on a healthy mix of cognitive psychology and introspection. I argue that a fixed design on a page provides better spatial cues for remembering material, and therefore benefits the overal reading experience. In a 1997 article entitled “What is memory for?”¹, AM Glenburg amusingly but insightfully discards the idea that “memory is for memorizing”. Instead he favors the view that we remember our environment by the way we interact with it, and its subsequent utility. Related work by Franklin & Tversky² and Longo & Laurenco³ show that our spatial memory favors certain relationships over others. Up versus down is easiest, because they greatly contrast each-other in the way we interact with them. Forward and backward in the three-dimensional sense is also easy for the same reason. But left versus right is more difficult because the way interact with them are nearly the same. But that is all to say that the spatial arrangement of objects can greatly affect the way we remember them.

So now let me take you back to, maybe college or high school. You’re taking a history exam and get to a question about the Whiskey Rebellion’s influence in the development of political parties in the United States. You know you read about this. You can recount lots of things about the Rebellion, but the stuff about political parties in the text book was in a blue box in the upper right hand side of the page…

It’s a common scenario that I think we’ve all been through whether in history, chemistry or any other subject. And maybe it wasn’t in an exam where your memory was tested, but you were trying to recall a reference. The point is that a dependable layout, one that doesn’t change on you, can help you recall what you read. It may be more efficient to keep your eyes half way down a screen and have text scroll by as you read as smoothly and as fast as possible, but what’s throughput worth if diminished spatial cues make it harder to remember what you read?

Back in the realm of today’s technology, all of this has little or nothing to do with Microsoft’s patent, or whether page turns are animated, have sounds, are quick, or anything like that. But it does elicit a little discussion about a pair of iPad apps. iBooks, and its variable-size fonts place the benefits of a stable layout in jeopardy. Change the size of the font, and the layout becomes completely different. But in an age of modern technology, why shouldn’t dedicated large-print books become obsolete? In the end, if you read at a consistent size, the layout is stable and catastrophe is averted. The two apps I want to give praise to with regard to stable layout and pagination over uncontrolled scrolling are WIRED and the New York Times apps. Each of them eschew the potentially cheesy and outmoded page curl, but retain a smart layout that’s easy to read and recall by preserving the satisfactory flip.

[1] Glenberg AM. 1997. What memory is for. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 20:1-55

[2] Franklin N, Tversky B. 1990. Searching imagined environments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 119:63-76

[3] Longo MR, Laurenco SF. 2007. Space perception and body morphology: extent of near space scales with arm length. Experimental Brain Research. 177:285-90