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Frequently Raised Concerns

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A monologue followed by some dialogue on why and what pagination.

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[Draft]

Pagination et al.​

One of the inescapable fact about books is the need to paginate 1 content. long-form is inaccessible by virtue of being, well, long, so the content must be cut up into smaller units—paging—which could be discrete pages like in a physical book or chapters on a PDF or something in-between such as in the shape of a "loose" reflowable website. One way or the other, pagination is a must if you want readers to be able to groove through your book comfortably and read it up until the very end. Then brag about having read it!

Generally, most writers (or makers) rely on how their readership perceives a book and then choose a container to suit that perception. By doing so, the maker automatically picks up a style of pagination that fits the body of work. Readers of J K Rowling, for example, love reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in paperbacks, so they get bifoliate pagination of the bound form. The expressiveness of the physical canvas is just too good and Harry Potter is a mass market product after all, whose fans care about Harry Potter more than anything else.

Ordinary folks care more about Harry Potter than the promises of tech emanating from a dinky little corner on the west coast.

Readers of Sarah Drasner’s book on SVG Animations, however, we might be inclined to assume will prefer an e-book? Her book is about bleeding edge of technology, and is not a mass market product by any measure and her fans (readers) are developers and tech evangelists who yap about digital coolness all day—about open web!

Nope. Not true in her case either.

Most developers buy a physical copy instead. These are Sarah’s own words:

I learn better with print, especially for technical material

— Sarah Drasner, Twitter

Sarah's comments aren't surprising though, because consumers have often admitted both in private and even online that physical books are way better 2 to hold on to and read from than anything else on market. If trends are to be believed, then at a very low-level between the physical and digital mediums we can safely assume that the physical books are winning. Digital form(s), for there are many, are unable to equal or exceed the product experience that we have collectively come to expect of books. At least that's how my personal opinion has formed over the years and the market seems to agree.

Which brings us to the first question: why hasn't the mass market switched?

A brief history of the book​

Books used to be physical scrolls 3 back in the day.

In fact scrolls were the first form of large record keeping texts used in Egyptian and other Eastern or Eastern Mediterranean cultures until the bound book with parchment pages was invented by the Romans near first century AD. With the bound book came the practice of foliation and dual-sided pagination that eventually replaced the mighty scroll about a thousand years later, ultimately morphing into a full blown "consumer books" industry with distribution networks after the circa 1,500 A.D. following the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press 4 .

In essence, between a modern day physical book and the physical scroll from back in the day we have had a clear winner emerge in past.

But a winner is yet to emerge in the digital realm, and in particular on web.

Credit: Joon Mo Kang, New York Times, 2011

The container influenceth the content​

If code is poetry then we can make a conjecture about the web in its current form: That more poetry has been written with the advent of web than ever before. The only other time poetry dominated the scene like this was when the physical scrolls were in vogue. Publishing records and the literature of the Renaissance period tell us that poetry peaked before the Gutenberg press. 'Exploits by Gilgamesh' or the epics like 'The Mahabharatha' or the 'Ramayana' 5 with over a hundred thousand verses designed to help the reader "listen in" attentively right up until the Middle ages when Chaucer was writing his famed Canterbury Tales are all but a proof of the correlation between the poetical construct and the physical scroll. How poetry, its ragged flow of sentences and its visual presentation lend itself to and manifest as the scroll, a container of choice to represent the conversation of the day.

How many major epic poems have been written since the Gutenberg press?

Please note that this essay highlights what appears to be at least anecdotally true. Estimating the downfall of poetical prose 6 or its correlation with physical scrolls, the influence on scanning direction, re-traceability and on grammar, punctuation and layout requires a more thorough and in-depth research which is completely out of scope for the purpose of this study.

With modern day books i.e. the codex form 7 the prose and punctuation drifted away from older poetical construct and an alternative style of writing and formatting was born without as much influence of the oral narrative. The layout mechanics changed and what emerged was the leafy pagination that continues to appeal and sell to this day.

Codex altered the concept of accessibility itself. For example, does the missing ragged right edge on this essay turn you off? Or will you prefer to read this essay unjustified on a book-like paginated form? I suspect that for justification this essay itself will have to be rewritten and adapted according to what works on the codex.

To summarize, while I'd never read Wuthering Heights or Harry Potter like a scroll, for those books I need the leafy pagination of a paperback, but at the same time cutting up a long blogpost (like this essay) and paginating it in form of a turnable book wouldn't automatically make it great read or even accessible. Connected words, sentences and paragraphs are only as much "consumer ready" as the container carrying them is. Switching from one type of container to another (dead-tree ⇋ digital) would entail rewriting the entire body of work. Rearranging it part-by-part manually, until the desired quality of literature is achieved.

In other words if web were to switch from scroll paradigm to page turns tomorrow, it sure is not going to be an easy task.

There is grammar to change as well.

Attention economy​

Another influence that scrolling animation has had on us is that our attention span 8, 9 has been shrinking for a while. For this reason alone scroll appears to be unsustainable in the long run, and web wouldn't survive or pay for itself without using newsy headlines that offer poetic justice. Here's what Slate had to say about what our experience with scrolls on the web is about in 2013:

"Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page."

— Slate Media Inc.

These are matters of attention economy, as some would put it, and we have now determined a model where the codex handles the attention span better, and we'll analyze how that works out next:

It is no surprise that people love lying down on a couch to read a book. The whole situation is naturally distraction-free and relaxing. That's how I read books for leisure, for example. But there are many other situations too in which people like to pick up and read a book: like when you're in a library. Or with a teacher in a classroom or while traveling on a plane or a train or by a river or on the beach. There are countless situations. A physical book works fine in nearly all places as long as it is not heavy to lug around and there aren't too many to carry.

With a physical book, the experience of turning a page to progress through a story gradually makes for a memorable 2 read. In fact to turn the page feels so nice that we even have a song go by its name to view story of our lives metaphorically. Going beyond experience page turns also happen to be the control of a book—it offers a candid control of the product. It's that important leverage which adds to the experience of reading long-form over a longer period of time. An experience that a scroll could never provide.

Page turns normalize the pace of reading and compel the reader to stop and focus on the story before proceeding (transitioning) to the next page, shearing away our instinct to 'click and surf' capriciously. The eyes can rest while we process the text, take it all in. We thus begin a "memory palace building" exercise as soon as the book is opened.

For what its worth, page turns appear critical for experiencing books in a way similar to how play and stop buttons are for the video tag. Personally, I used to like UI/UX of iBooks when the iPad was announced by Steve Jobs in early 2010. Now, the experience of Apple Books is more like a powerpoint presentation: slide left or right, go fast, fast, fast and forget even faster. It's unbearable to my sensibilities of a book.

Tyranny of the scroll.​

Don't get me wrong I love the scroll, but just not for books. Scrolling is an impossible paradigm for books. It doesn't align well with the intent of traversing long-form where the pursuit is to chew on every sentence until the very end. For example, no one wants to read Harry Potter like a scroll. But that's not the only problem about scrolling on a digital canvas. Reflow makes it worse. Reflow is in fact so bad for books that we'll get to talking about it on a separate post later on. With physical scrolls at least reflow was never an issue and the really long works could easily be cut-up into separate volumes. Pagination.

Here's an example of the classic pagination on Google Search results page:

Numerical pagination on Google search results page is a great example of what paginated scrolling means and does to our attention span. It aligns well with the intent to quickly bring the best result to the top (which is great!) but misses the intent of traversing the whole list (long-form) to completion. And that's probably one of the main reasons why web has an industry for SEO and but not for books.

We digress here somewhat, but scrolling is not even imperative for web anymore. I mean why would scrolling be the only way to consume content on, say, the iPad? I could turn the pages instead—iPad is not pointer driven!

Try the book Pride and Prejudice on your iPad Safari, for example.

In my opinion, the amount of time and money spent to figure out smooth asynchronous scrolling, parallax scrolling, infinite scrolling, momentum scrolling and whatnot is a complete waste of engineering effort on an airplane that's never going to be viable—speed scrolling doesn't solve the problem we are at as a society. It doesn't pass the Occam's razor. Codex form on the other hand with ordinary page turns does the job simply. It aligns best with the intent of long-form traversal like reading a book. If anything success of physical books despite every other industry buckling under the pressure of web is an ample indication of the missing piece. Sure page turns slow me down a bit but that's a good thing.

When it comes to books, I'd prefer being on a Boeing 747 than an Aérospatiale Concorde. It helps me stay relaxed on the content and helps me focus and read attentively without dragging my eyes for speed. Now, let's take a look at another issue of scroll depth over smartphone next.

Inaccessibility hiding in plain sight.​

Here's a website (they call it a book) on Essentials of Image Optimizations by Addy Osmani.

Excellent write-up but it takes about ~90 (+/- 5) scroll actions using a mousewheel to reach the bottom of the essay while also maintaining the reading direction i.e. making sure I "saw" all of the content (am emulating experience of committing to and reading the book for real here) sequentially. The same website takes close to ~194 swipes to scroll down to the bottom on an iPhone X Safari and ~244 swipes on the Android Galaxy Express 3 while also ensuring that all of the content was seen by me. I don't know about others, but I'd never scroll deeper than seven times for even the best blogpost of this decade on my mobile. A maximum of ten swipes if it's really interesting content or an important one.

Scrolling 200 swipes down (really deep) on a mobile is an impossible feat. Expecting people to do it is rather inhumane. I'd buy a physical book instead. Besides the fact that it is nigh impossible to reach the end of a book by Addy Osmani this way simply because of the massive number of scroll-actions required to do so, it is also easy to be lifted off from the middle of the book by simply (or by accident) touching the bezel on top. Good luck trying to get back to the point in the book where you were lifted away from!

We reported this accessibility issue for content of medium to long length sitting between desktops and mobile to the W3C.

In my opinion, even if we somehow figured out love between scrolling and long-form (with desktop style pagination or hashed links, say), a physical book would still beat the electronic avatar hands down with its firm layout, solid control, strong formatting, beautiful typography, illustrations and a tactile warmth that isn't possible to achieve with traditional e-book formats due to the requirement of reflow. Reflow must be relinquished if we want books to transmogrify successfully into the digital realm forever.

Consumers expect a finished product with a great feel when they are about to spend money on it. The bar is really high. Existing e-book solutions fail at that miserably on every aspect and that is why dead-tree is thriving despite being dead. Despite being expensive (and to the trees) and despite the space that they take up in our ever-shrinking homes.

Not conflating the definition​

I'm often told that if the content is of a book then it is a book. I disagree. What is a manuscript then? What about the final-cut? Let's take a look at the original definition 10 of a book first:

"A book is a series of pages assembled for easy portability and reading, as well as the composition contained in it. The book's most common modern form is that of a codex volume consisting of rectangular paper pages bound on one side, with a heavier cover and spine, so that it can fan open for reading."

From the definition of the most common form of modern book above (the codex volume) we can easily see that existing e-book solutions address only a part of what makes a book a book—portability, which no doubt is better solved with software, but they miss on the 'composition' and 'fan open for reading' part because, well, it has been traditionally difficult to implement and meet the specification as is without hurting accessibility.

Now that is about to change, as you'll soon see with Superbooks— our proposal.

What is a Superbook?​

In software (or computer science) terms:

"Superbook means superclass of an object like book."

Going by the definition of a Superbook we can extract a technical re-definition of a book from its original definition as follows:

"Book is an ordered stack of nicely formatted pages."

…where stack in the definition above is a standard linear data structure (AST) that serves as a collection of pages over which mutative operations such as push, pop and peek could be carried out with the order of elements remaining sequential.

First principles thinking​

In the physical world books and files are two separate class of products.

Files belong to the enterprise usecase whereas books belong to the consumer. Files represent bureaucracies whereas books represent what our children want (or the child within us that wants to listen to a story), and therefore product qualities and attributes are radically different. Books are about creativity, about counter-culturism and about overthrowing rotten ideals on our society. Files are more or less about encoding them.

As compared to how physical books are completely unrelated to physical files that we use in offices, in the world of software files get passed around as e-books regularly. Despite the fact that most file formats and related software has been developed keeping in mind the enterprise usecase first.

Which brings us to the second most important question: Why should an e-book book be a file at all?

Other than portability there dosn't seem to be a single quality or behavior that is shared between a book and a digital file. Do people want to own an "XML" of Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban? I don't think so. Not unless they were writing a parser utility like developers usually do, which is a very specific use-case.

Applying first principles thinking here helps us arrive at two core issues:

  1. Can an enterprise-y file (like PDF or any other format) equal or exceed the experience of an atomic book?​

    > Almost never.

  2. Can a yet-to-exist software avatar of a physical book exceed the physical form in potential?​

    > May be.

Is there a web standard or a library that treats a book like a first class citizen of web?

In other words, do existing e-book solutions which are essentially pestiferous files masquerading as e-books meet the definition of a book? Nope, it does not! Files are not a consumer product to begin with and therefore solutions based off of files cannot compete with the dead-tree medium indefinitely—not without conflating the definition of the most common form of modern book itself.

Unsurprisingly, the markets have made their choice very clear 11, 12 and the success of physical books despite everything else having moved online—like music away from audio cassettes or videos away from CDs—shows that e-books in their existing file form don't stand a chance all by themselves. We need something new, something ground-up! that is truer to the idea of books than files could ever be. This is especially true for consumers who have a high bar for experience and are about to pay for something that they really want.

Meet Bubblin Superbooks​

Url: https://bubblin.io

Bubblin is new take on bringing true-to-life books online. It is both 'iPad first' and 'offline first', but should work just fine on any device. See the current level of [support]. The book reader emulates bifoliate pagination of a real book responsively with optimized page turns at a buttery 60 FPS. We expect to improve this with our next release of Bookiza alongwith Houdini & Waapi alternatives at near-native level of performance on web.

Do star us on Github and bookmark us as your next generation publisher, if you will. 🙂

We at Bubblin think that online books and their diaspora has not even been invented yet. Our current reality of downloadable files that is tied to some piece of hardware is a lazy shortchange in place of a real online book that is yet to happen. Proprietary enterprise software, business style documents, word processors and a slew of incompatible formats in the wild isn't something that a true book lover will ever espouse.

Our hope with Bubblin is to try and solve the following:

(A.) As a reader, do I

  1. Have to worry about a file or a format?
  2. Be faced with compatibility issues or older editions?
  3. Need to reach out for file or an artifact somewhere on the disk?
  4. Worry about disk space for my books?
  5. Manage a library myself?

(B.) As a writer, do I have to

  1. Live in a hope that someone will download my work of months (or even years) as opposed to view it online?
  2. Navigate to the file that was downloaded and open it to read as opposed to, again, simply read on web?
  3. Give my rights to the book away or can I sell to make a profit and a living without having to?
  4. How collaborative and easy is the writing tool for books on web?

These are some of the motivations and questions behind our startup [Bubblin Superbooks], and of course we don't have answers to all of them yet. I hope that some of you will find this project interesting and help us take books on web natively. Help us bring reading to everyone and not just those who own a Kindle or an iPhone.

Join us on news.bubblin to discuss any of the ideas laid out here.

Question & Answers​

  1. Isn't expecting writers to know basic web development (HTML) a huge ask? Accepted.​

    It is, and that's a good thing.

    The biggest hurdle here is not just that writers are accustomed to using word processors and file systems for distribution of their work but also the fact that the web itself lacks support for books natively. We don't have an HTML tag for books like we do it for videos, for example. This will need people from different corners of the web to come together and agree that book is a separate category of consumer product that we need to support. Consider the needs and behavior of real users over authors, over implementers, over specifiers, over the theoretical purity of sticking just to scroll.

    We want to make it easy for people to sell and consume long-form online, directly.

    For now, we're happy to help authors migrate their work online as their publisher. Take a look at Bookiza Abelone – a free and open source book reification framework.

  2. Isn't page turn animation a skeuomorphism? Invalid​

    Not at all.

    Page turns are an essential behavior of a book and emulating that behavior and control doesn't automatically imply skeuomorphism. Not anymore than the skeuomorphism of the scroll itself.

    Superbooks don't pick skeuomorphic elements of a physical book at all. It doesn't display a leather bound spine or a hard over-the-top cover on the book, for example. We are careful about scaling the actual contents as well and use the flat design principle alongwith a simple algorithm to acquire maximum symmetrical real estate (aspect-ratio remaining constant) in the visible region of the viewport.

    In general we have followed a path of minimalism for Superbooks, and we leave other decisions like choosing a layout, selecting accessibility features and presentation rest with the community. As discussed in the essay above, data shows that page turns are critical to the success of digital books. It separates the idea of a book from say a powerpoint presentation, an article or a slidedeck.

  3. Page turn is annoying after sometime? Resolved.​

    Page turning animation can easily be turned off or adjusted for speed from the [Settings] panel of your Bubblin Account. Be warned that doing so will adversely affect your ability to form visuospatial memories with stronger recall pointers—ala, lower your retention.

  4. Why page turn animation and why not do just a scroll? Accepted.​

    Web is generally bad at long-form. To mitigate some of the issues of long-form we need pagination. And if paginating, then why not do it in a way that normal readers already love? In our opinion, ability to turn the page represents a critical control of a book, just like play/stop buttons are for online videos.

    Here are some of the advantages:

    1. It paces you correctly and helps with visuospatial memorization ("memory palace" building),
    2. Let's you focus on content at hand instead of wondering where you are on the container,
    3. Better accessibility than a long infinite scroll or a lifeless file outside of web,
    4. Separates the notion of book from other digital products like a powerpoint presentation or an image carousel.

    That said, there are certain accessibility issues and edge case scenarios where the Superbook container falls short of being great. We'll be addressing those issues as we make more progress on the project.

  5. Hasn't this been tried with FLASH fifteen years ago? Resolved​

    Probably. We don't use flash and have not tried implementing the Superbook container using it.

    In general, if this has been tried before, even just a few years ago, it's likely that such a project would have met a stiff upclimb simply because of the fact that web had been a "desktop only" paradigm then. That is no longer the case with web today in 2019. Over 90% people consume web on mobile or tablets and on touch surfaces, page turns feel far more native and accessible than they ever did on a pointer-driven desktop.

    Also, out of respect let's not forget that Macromedia flash itself was a game changer back in the day. It gave us Youtube and Vimeo, and even porn websites so that we don't have to download and hold on to files on the disk. Today we have a video tag in HTML vocabulary because of Flash! While Flash may have failed to deliver on promise of books (pagination with page turns) on the web in the past but that doesn't mean its impact and contribution to the web was any less spectacular.

  6. …but isn't the web about just being good with the scroll? Resolved​

    That is correct. But just not with books.

    With more than 15 years behind us on web development, we are super confident about using the scroll for everything else that we have created or consumed online. Scrolling is fine as long as it is about short blogs, displaying a list or reading a bunch of daily news articles. It works great for a conversation like an interesting discussion on Reddit or chat or even a thread of comments under a Youtube video. To watch the video however, we want the scroll to step aside and the web to give us the ability to play, stop and go fullscreen on the video. Similarly with books we need the ability to turn the page, go distraction free with fullscreen mode and never have to scroll.

    We believe that as long as the body of text is not large (like books), the scroll does a splendid job. However, the scroll needs to step aside when it comes to books and we need to emulate the native controls and behavior of a codex book take over instead: and that is discreet pagination with page turns.

  7. If the content is a book, it is a book… Wontfix​

    We respectfully disagree. It could even be a manuscript no?

    In our opinion, the container, the packaging, formatting, and the behavior of a book are important as well. Having just the content without a firm layout or the controls of a book is akin to having a 1,000 pounds of Egyptian cotton that couldn't equal a mattress on which people can sleep on. If you force the scroll on everything, people will buy a physical book instead.

  8. What happens when the text reflows? Resolved​

    It doesn't reflow at all. This is key!

    Superbooks use a concept called strong layouts that effectively scales content responsively without triggering a reflow. Hint: We use viewport units, flexbox and css grids!

  9. Is this yet another e-book format? Resolved​

    No, it isn't. There is no format between the reader (end user) and the book.

    We think it is a travesty for people to (still) worry about files or format when all they want is to read a simple book. With Bubblin we remove all that friction between your book and the readers in a way similar to how Youtube does it for videos.

  10. How does it compare with epub? Accepted​

    The comparison with epub is not one-to-one.

    Epub is probably a superset by virtue of being an open standard with an ecosystem and container software of its own (example: Calibre). The only problem with epub is that it lives outside of web, and thus, is inaccessible by default. People have to download an epub file first, navigate to that file and then open it with another piece of software that was installed to even begin reading.

    Superbooks on the other hand live on web and they can be read and shared immediately. Just like a blog! In essence both epubs and Superbooks are similar in that both use standard elements of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to produce a book, but with the latter the reader software is the web browser itself (and therefore, there isn't a need for people to leave the web at any point of time.) and no further installations are required.

    A detailed note comparing the two ecosystems could be written only after some more progress.

  11. How does it compare with a PDF? Accepted​

    Comparison of Superbooks with PDFs and pretty much any other business file format out there is flawed to begin with simply because books aren't files. We can't make a seven year old happy with a PDF of 'Little Red Riding Hood'.

    A more technical difference between a Superbook and a file format like PDF is that Superbooks are websites and not files. A superbook is collection of hundreds and thousands of web pages on a stack that always remains above the fold.

    That said, we know that in past due to the absence of a container like Superbooks on web, a lot e-books have been produced in form of PDFs (files). How those files could be mutated into Superbooks remains to be explored. A detailed analysis is possible only with some more time.

  12. Doesn't this make a book inaccessible? Accepted​

    Not as much as a file does.

    With files we are effectively sending people away from web. By doing so we can avoid the burden of solving accessibility issues for books on the web but it does leave people struggling about what a file does, how it could be opened or what software is necessary open it with. The web can help us avoid the hoops that people need to jump through before they can get to their book.

  13. What do you use? Resolved​

    Good ol' HTML. A Superbook is a collection (ordered stack) of formatted webpages. It's also an offline-first single page static app (SPA) with usual markup i.e. HTML, CSS and JavaScript paginated in form of a real book. You're gonna love it!

  14. How do I download the book? Resolved​

    You don't have to! It downloads itself.

    Once a Superbook is opened on your browser it will automatically install itself and continue to work offline i.e. without Internet connectivity. This process is seamless and automatic. For those inclined about tech under the hood we use Service Workers to provide this offline-first experience.

  15. How can I add it on my Paperwhite? Wontfix​

    Our intent is to separate e-books from hardware and set it free. While we support a large number of devices and operating systems including Kindles that sport a modern browser, Paperwhite is not one of them. We'll review this answer in future should we find a way to be able to reach a non-web devices directly. Here's full list of [devices] that we currently support.

References:​