The page turn animation was truly excellent. I have seen a few other apps/sites try to copy it, some of them did it pretty well. But one detail I’ve never seen anyone else do: the text of the curled page is “distorted” in 3D, as one would expect of a real page. The closer the letters are to the part of the page that’s orthogonal to the screen, the more the are squished.
It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.
iPhone iOS design used to be excellent.
Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016:
“ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.”
At some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?
I don't expect this will happen. There's a good reason why floppy disks are no longer used, but I would be surprised if physical books ever go away.
Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.
Sure, but how much closer to the physical book reading experience does a page flip animation really get us?
In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...
I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.
Glowing in the dark is as much a bug as a feature. Lit screens work best in a dark room, where a reading light is more pleasant when you pause reading to do something else.
I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.
An e-ink reader does it better because the front lighting is less glaring and the overall image is more stable. It’s hard to get a phone screen to the right brightness level for reading in the dark, but an ereader will have a very dim front light that you only notice when the room is completely dark.
Kindle Paperwhite 5th gen has both amber and white LEDs and its color temperature can be adjusted. I don't know exactly what light temperature range it has but it feels very "warm" on maximum setting.
There is something about owning a book and having your own hard library. I love to do almost everything on the phone; news, tv, videos, Ect.
Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.
User Interface that is easy to imagine as a physical object is easier to figure out. It doesn't matter if the user is familiar with the physical object being emulated on the screen. Because laws of physics are still applicable even if you haven't seen such a physical object in real life.
The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.
I don’t have any data to back it up but I doubt that. Schools are still mostly using paper text books. And I reckon school libraries are still the main source of books for kids (who typically don’t have money to buy books). Family members who want to buy you a book as a gift, will do that on paper as gifting ebooks is trickier and less personal.
To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.
True. But piracy is a big issue, and it exclusively happens digitally. I wonder what the numbers would look like if you factored in pirated ebooks/etextbooks.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what but the flat design seems charmless compared to the Forstall-era skeuomorphic design. And the vanilla sameness and uniformity makes it harder to distinguish things. It reminds me a bit of shelving books by size and color rather than by content.
I recently noticed a bunch of electric street lamps that are clearly modeled on gaslamps - they appear to have little chimney vents as well as wide pipes for the nonexistent gas, and they seem designed to shield the LED/CFL/etc. fixture from wind and rain. Mostly non-functional design elements, and I've only seen a few dozen actual gas streetlamps in cities, but I still find them charming.
>It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.
It's not possible with public UIKit / CoreAnimation APIs. Those only support homogenous linear transformations (i.e. 4x4 matrix). You may try using the private CAMeshTransform API to achieve such an effect: https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/
You can actually do it in UIKit by chopping it up into strips and using affine transforms, I've seen it done. Not that I think this is UIKit, it's probably a very simple OpenGL shader.
But did it alternate between the left and right pages? The swipe from left page to right page shouldn't have been a page-turn; it should be a horizontal scroll across the book's binding. The swipe after THAT should be a page-turn.
maybe i'm just unsophisticated but what exactly is the point of it? all this work for basically nothing. and we wonder why our apps are bloated and need ridiculously overpowered hw.
There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.
Is it the reflectance/emission? Perhaps, Kindles are better than iPads; is it the resolution? Perhaps, retina iPads are better than pre/non-retina tablets; is it the tactile sensation? Perhaps, I find matt paper better than the gloss of many magazines, and the new Paperwhite is half way between on that score.
Perhaps I'm just remembering good times from my childhood, and skeuomorphisms are a way to catch that.
But no, a 3D animation like this is not the reason why apps are bloated. Other similar animations were smooth on a 450 MHz G3.
> There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.
For me it’s the exact opposite. I read a lot, mostly on my Kindle Oasis (139 titles this year so far according to Kindle Insights) and on the very rare occasion I read a paper book I’m reminded how annoying reading paper books is.
There are several issues with reading paper books:
First, the physical format, long books are thick and unwieldy. There is no comfortable way to read in bed. You either read laying on your back, holding the book above your face, which is uncomfortable to hold and tires your arms. When laying on your side the fact that books fold in the middle is super annoying, if you open the book at a 90° angle you can only really read one page and you have to turn yourself after every page. Holding it open fully also isn’t comfortable.
Next, there is the light issue. Paper only reflects light, meaning you always need an external light source. It’s much easier for me to immerse myself in a story reading in a dark room. Another issue with external light is that you have to orient yourself relative to the light source. Again, when reading in bed this is a problem if your light source is on your nightstand. If you turn to a different side you are lying in your own shadow.
Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment. Getting my hands on them in the first place would also be a problem. I can browse books online and find something I’m in the mood for right now and be reading it in 30 seconds instead if waiting days for delivery. I can binge through a series in days instead of weeks.
No, I really don’t want to go back to dead tree books and I can’t believe people put up with the inconvenience when there is no longer a need to.
i mostly agree... i think a lot of people haven't tried the more recent higher-end e-readers... i'd say both the oasis and the kobo forma are getting quite close to strict improvements on the trade paperback... i still love a good, well-worn <400 page mass-market paperback sometimes though, truly the greatest height of the dead-tree format. e-readers haven't seen dramatic technical improvement, but response times have gotten a lot faster, and manufacturers have pretty much all finally figured out physical buttons for page turning is the way to go.
last time i read a trade paper, the weight and lighting issues dominated any of the pleasant tactility of paper.
that said, i do miss the random-access characteristics of physical books: being able to have fingers between multiple pages to skip between sections and the ability to quickly visually binary-search for something. these seem solvable but require some master UI work
> Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment.
The other side of that is discoverability. So much of my fondness for reading today comes from the fact that I grew up in a house packed with books, practically a shelf in every room, and as a child it was so easy to just pick a book off the shelf and start reading.
The Kindle Oasis is my preferred way to read now, but if when I was a child my dad had read everything electronically, would I be reading (e)books today, or would I have never read enough casually to develop a love of the medium?
That’s why in 2022 I keep the bookshelves in my house overflowing.
Likewise, I find that browsing through a bookstore or library is still much more enjoyable than trying the same thing with an online shop when I don't have a certain book in mind and am just trying to discover some random bit of reading.
It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it. This simple fact was ignored for the last 30+ years of OS vendors pushing inverse color schemes on us. I see it as a vestige of the "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s/early '90s, which sought to make the computer screen an analogy for a piece of paper. Or Apple's attempt to look "different."
Now all of a sudden people finally realized that reading dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day is a shitty way to work, and vendors have backpedaled clumsily to offering a hard-coded "dark mode." But we already had an even-better solution: Windows let users set up their own system-wide color scheme, from Windows 3.1 through XP or even Vista. Any properly-constructed application would inherit the system colors for various on-screen elements and guarantee legibility. If you wanted to change the look of all your applications, you had one central place to do it. And if, as a developer, you wanted to guarantee a color scheme, all you had to do was make sure you overrode both foreground and background colors.
But Microsoft actually REMOVED that capability just in time for it to become desirable to more people than ever. Brilliant.
>It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it.
What's the difference? I've seen it repeated over and over and it never made any sense. If your screen is too bright compared to the environment, turn it down. The only practical difference seems to be uniformity - screens are much more uniform. No shadows, no dependency on the angle to the light source etc. Which is... great?
The first things that springs to my mind is that the spectrum of emitted light from an active display is different from that of reflected sunlight/artificial light off of paper made from pulp/linen/cotton.
Active displays can be fatiguing for a variety of reasons, including brightness as you mention, but also the "unnatural" light spectrum.
Also, of course, blue light is believed to affect your circadian rhythm, so can cause disturbances after sundown. Most ebook readers have adjustments for this though.
It's a good question. One thing is that the brightness of the page will always be appropriate for the ambient light, since it is determined by that light.
Beyond that, I'd speculate that screens don't retain as much contrast when you turn their brightness down, compared to physical materials presenting similar "brightness" under ambient light. But really that's just some talking out the ass with no research to back it up.
Screens aren't precise and aren't natural. If you have good enough vision or a bad enough screen, you see that it's a bunch of squares that try to imitate shapes, and even have spaces between them.
Also, the lighting looks fake. Even on good modern screens, there's a billboard feeling I can't ignore. I think that's your reflectance/emission point; it's not light reflecting on an object like literally everything you look at, it's an object blasting light at you trying to make it look real.
Even many low-end devices have better screens nowadays than to see pixels themselves. Also, I don’t get this “natural” point, reading itself is unnatural and not too healthy, not because of light reflection vs emission, but because focusing on one point for a long time, which is the same in both types of reading.
The books underlying required even more work and they’re just a bunch of bytes that accomplish nothing. Some of them are even about something made up entirely and serve no purpose.
This animation was super smooth on even the slowest iPad.
The point of it is: they were going to do a skeuomorphic animation, and they put the effort in to do it right. It's a level of polish that I really appreciate, even though it isn't really necessary for anything.
> even though it isn't really necessary for anything.
It is one of the best, if not the best, way of letting users know what their action will lead to, and of letting them explore the range of available actions.
By behaving similarly to a well-know interface, it simplifies discovery, lowers friction and reduces frustration.
So when smartphones and touch interfaces were new to most people, behaviours such as this one were major, although nearly invisible, product features.
Now? Yes, it mostly isn’t necessary to anything, but it was nice.
I have one app that does it, it doesn't do the corner curl, but it does do the side curl with the reverse text showing on the other side. It uses OpenGL to do it and that is how you can do it.
UI designers seem to bring about changes now, just to show you that they are busy somehow or that there's sorts of progress. The "Second Watershed" as Ivan Illich describes it in "Tools for Conviviality" has reached the Computer User Interface Design as well. How much more can they mutilate it, before they improve it by going back to iOS 1 design paradigm?
> But even if I were to buy a Kobo or Boox or something, that wouldn’t help me with the dozens of books I’ve already purchased on Apple’s platform
THIS is the real problem. Books (or music, movie, whatever) tied to one specific platform, without any chance to migrate somewhere else - somewhere where is more comfortable/convenient for you.
My preference is to buy eBooks from non-DRM bookstores. That allows you to donwload the books and use any ePUB or PDF reader you link on whatever device you like. If a book is not available in a non-DRM format, I would rather buy the actual book or borrow from my library.
Libreture maintains a list of such bookstores [1].
I just tried dragging a purchased book to Finder, and it only gives me a .webloc pointing to the book's store URL. On the other hand, if I manually locate the book in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books, it appears to just be an (unzipped) ePub without any encryption.
It's up to the publisher whether content bought from the Apple store has DRM, not the store itself. Many books have it, but publishers like TOR and any books from Brandon Sanderson don't. There's sometimes a line at the bottom of the description that'll note it. For example, on Redshirts (https://books.apple.com/us/book/redshirts/id501758516)
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Still, signing into public devices with your private credentials and data is a bad idea. What if they kick you out of the store or take away the device your were toying with before you manage to wipe/reset it?
The person you're replying to is suggesting "go to the apple store and use one of their demo computers to export the book", not "go to the apple store and buy a Mac".
That's... bizarre. They didn't make the animation non-skeuomorphic, they just switched to a different and very weird skeuomorphism that has nothing to do with how actual books work. It's worse than if they had just made it completely flat.
It’s not skeuomorphic to books but it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards. The shading and the motion is definitely meant to make it feel like a physical object moving.
> it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards.
Except with a stack of cards (or pages) the bottom page would not be moving. The visual is more reminiscent of some sort of assembly / processing line.
One wonders if Forstall would be the Jobs type figure to return to on the back of a white horse aquihire should Apple ever fall into dire straits again.
I don’t think he’s actually working anywhere that could be bought, though.
It is trendy right now to add superfluous animation to delight the user. In this case, they decided to slide in the next page at a different rate than the previous page. It is worse than before because we can't really start reading until we fully turn the page.
I wish they would tone down and or remove all skeuomorphic and animations across all of macOS iOS and iPadOS. They are distracting to me and I usually turn them off in the accessibility settings.
Sounds like Apple gave you a way to solve your problem. Personally, I like the animations, but I'm glad users have the option to turn them on and off as they wish.
The problem is that switch is global on iOS. I don't want to remove all animations, just some of them. Android has the same problem here: I want to disable many animations because I find them annoying and intrusive, but some critical animations like loading spinners break when animations are disabled, so I do the next best thing and increase the speed.
At least iOS lets you change the font size for each application independently, which is a feature that I make heavy use of. I like larger fonts, but sometimes this results in text being truncated too early, and being able to selectively reduce the font size makes it feasible to have a larger default font size. For whatever reason this is not possible on Android, and changing the font size takes several seconds to kick in, so even manually boosting the font size for certain cases via a shortcut or automation is annoying.
I think it makes sense to have the page turn process take a little time and have a little bit of visual transition. Our visual processing system isn't great at knowing whether a new screen of text has been loaded, especially, if we're blinking when it happens. Having a brief animation helps us know that yes, you did just tap the edge of the screen, and accordingly the page has been turned.
I'm gonna shill for apple and say that this is probably an oversight. Something that has been around for years and everyone expects to work as such that fell out of QA testing. Hopefully they bring it back after realizing their slipup.
That being said, I've used Kindle for years because it's online etc. They have had this same feature for years on their mobile versions so I don't get how this was a killer feature of Books.
The Apple Books version wasn't just a static animation—you could partially flip the page, flip it back, make just the corner flip up a little then push it back in place, et c., all with smooth and responsive enough operation that it was close-enough to feeling like a real, physical thing. The "back" of the page, as it flipped, showed the text from the front as if it were showing through thin paper, it wasn't just blank. Lots of apps have page flip animations but most of them are both non-interactive and bad. Apple's was interactive and good. Dunno if Kindle's is as good—I used it long ago and my recollection was a slow, ugly, non-interactive page flip animation, but it may have changed since then.
[EDIT] Two key real-book-reading behaviors this enabled, that a non-interactive page flip animation (which I personally find a ton worse than no animation) does not:
1) You could "play" with the corner and edge of the page while reading. Great for fidgeters, and analogous to what some of us do when reading real books.
2) You could start to flip the page as you were nearing the end of the current page.
Kindle's animation is pretty good, and I did that fidgeting thing with it all the time. I've never experienced the stuttering on Android that the OP has on iOS. It also shows the text bleeding through the back side of the page.
But the animation is disabled by default and lately I've stuck with the regular sliding animation because it's faster and much less obtrusive. It also lets you start turning the page as you're reading the last line.
I disagree that something like this could have been an oversight. A designer spent time coming up with the new animation, it was approved by somebody in a project management role, and engineers had to spend time implementing the new feature.
Apple has an intense culture of dogfooding, so it would surprise me very much if someone in a leadership position didn't experience the new page-flipping animation, much less explicitly approve its design.
But what I could imagine is that it fell out of product oversight and an engineer just came along and said "well that's a really complicated piece of code, I don't want to maintain that, I'll replace it with something simple", and nobody pushed back because this isn't a high-priority feature any more
That’s not really a change you miss if you do any QA of that app at all. And if it was missed that’s even worse for Apple than if it was a conscious choice.
My shill for Apple here is that the simple sliding animation is much better. I never liked that book animation. It felt heavy and distracting and out of place like most skeuomorphism.
It wasn't just skeuomorphic, it had a functional component. It helped you keep your place and maintain context as you turned the page, just as you'd do with your finger while reading a real book.
No one has ever designed a physical book that works anything like the new page-turning approach, and you have to believe there's a reason for that.
Huh. I always _hated_ that page turning animation, because it obscured the content and made it difficult to quickly swipe back and forth.
It was also slow, interrupting my reading flow. When I'm reading something exciting, I always start reading at a fast pace, and the interruption in reading while I turn each page feels like a video constantly stopping to buffer.
Both of these factors apply to physical books to some extent, but much less so – mainly because you can fit much more text on a book page than on a phone screen, and also because you can turn a physical page quite fast.
Slow page turns are also the reason I don't like ePaper readers. In that case it's not an animation slowing things down, but the ePaper refresh time.
Anyway, this is why I used to use the iOS Kindle app instead of Apple Books (née iBooks) – because the Kindle app uses a simple horizontal sliding animation (similar to Libby in the article) that is faster and doesn't obscure content. However, Apple Books eventually added a mode that removes pages altogether in favor of a continuous vertical scroll, which I now use.
I just briefly tried Apple Books' new page turning animation, and I definitely prefer it, though it's still a bit slow and I still prefer the vertical scroll. Perhaps the change was made with users like me in mind.
Which is not to say I'm happy with the old animation being taken away from users who liked it! I appreciate that my sensitivity to interruptions is idiosyncratic, and the old animation certainly had superior aesthetics. Ideally it would be a setting.
I also hate page turning animations. Maybe it's my dumb brain but it's super distracting and I never could learn to ignore it. I finally found an e-reader app that let me disable all animations and just immediately cuts to the new page. When I'm reading and I hit the end of the page, by the time my eye has moved back to the top of the screen the new page is there and if I time my tap correctly I don't even see the page change. It's the only way for me to read now.
This. So much this. I also use scrolling mode for everything, that page turn animation was slow af and distracted me no end. It was beautiful, no doubt, but just not bearable enough when you need an immersive experience in a book.
As an avid user of Books, page turn animation is distracting. And it seems nobody is talking about the huge bug fix of bookmarks and last read sync. Previous OS this was nowhere to be found and was so buggy.
So why is the page flipping animation missing in iOS16?
My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take over the performance critical code in Objective C for the page flipping animation.
I really doubt the issue is technical. The page curl rendering itself was implemented in Core Animation. The application side just set the parameters for the position of the curl. It worked well even on the original iPad.
I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.
Maybe that was how Apple operated under Steve Jobs (developers would work days and nights to make Steve Jobs vision work despite technical challenges) but unfortunately it does not seem to be how Apple operates anymore.
The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
Right?? It’s absurd how I sometimes wait three seconds for it to switch the pane content after clicking another settings category, downright infuriating.
I wonder if the usability issues are a result of using Swift UI (because it's just too hard to make good UIs in SwiftUI) or because they just don't care about usability any more.
I think, as with the questionable quality of the Catalyst-created macOS apps that preceded the new System Preferences, it was a desire to show off a new framework while it is still in a semi-beta unfinished state, let alone before the best practices for these new technologies have been devised yet.
You may already be aware of this, but it is very easy to mix Swift and ObjC in the same codebase. There’s nothing technical stopping them from plucking the ObjC page-turning transition into the Swift app.
If you have a monopoly over a platform, what is there to keep you from being lazy? Plenty of rich lazy fools spend lavishly, it wouldn't be an original story.
The size of a team working on one product at a large company has nothing to do with the size of the company or its real estate budget.
Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better.
Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
Whether it was the choice of an individual engineer or designer, or the choice of a high-level executive to not put anyone who cared about design on the Books team, the fact remains that Apple chose not to keep this animation.
You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
It's not a question of laziness it's a question of prioritization and opportunity cost.
The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already.
The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
I don't think it's what happened in this case, but extremely lazy crap makes it all the way to public releases for all the tech giants. Engineer count and cash-on-hand don't seem to have much to do with it.
There is no way that the change was due to performance. The old page flipping animation was delightful, but in no way computationally significant on iPhones even 5 years ago.
My blind guess: The code for the page flip animation was old/complicated, and the engineer who wrote the code left the team. No one else felt comfortable maintaining the code, and Design saw this as an opportunity to simplify the UI.
> E-reader fans might say that I should be doing my reading on a dedicated device that’s not as subject to ever-changing software
Oh boy, if you think dedicated devices don't have the same problem of frustrating updates, then I got some bad news for you. I still remember how annoyed I was when Kindle update added recommendations (=ads) on my home menu.
Does that also show up in the ads free version? I’m looking at getting a kindle and that might be a deal breaker to me, I’ll have to look at alternatives
This might be a result of my Kindle being old, it's the 2012 model. It doesn't have ads.
I am concerned that it might break, because none of the newer Kindle work like the old one. It has button, a non-touch display and isn't backlit, all things I consider must have feature, or non-features. Personally I don't understand why they didn't just stop development at that point and just lowered prices as the components became less and less expensive.
Not defending the first two (physical page turn buttons are great!) but on my 2018 paperwhite, the backlight will turn off entirely at the lowest brightness setting.
“Customer research shows that digital natives have low attention spans, so we introduced a persistent reminder of the title of the book they are reading in between page slides.”
This happens to me, too! If I read a physical book I can easily recall the author and the title months and even years later. But when I read digital books I often struggle to remember a book’s name and have to look it up if I want to recommend it to someone.
My guess is it's mostly because the physical book's cover's always visible in your environment, even when you're not reading, so you see the title and author's name a lot more. Some e-readers put the cover on when in sleep mode, but that's small, black-n-white, only on one side (no spine) so it's easily covered up, et c.
Books also often put some or all of that info at the top of every page or every other page, while many reader apps hide it most of the time, I suppose to save space for body text.
OneAd free Kindles (can) display the cover of the book you're currently reading during idle mode. I love it because I used to leave a book on a coffee table or my desk as a kind of physical invitation to read (instead of watching TV or playing video games or derping on my phone).
Such a tiny feature, but since I've turned it on it has nudged me to read hours more each week.
It feels like I was looking at a pile of cards, and then magical scissors cut a window out of the top one just before it moves.
But then the window doesn't move with the card that it was cut from, so I realize I was mistaken. There is no window or magical scissors. Instead, I have momentarily acquired x-ray vision but it only works on part of the card.
also annoying how when you "sample" a book the title of the book is displayed over every single page. certainly makes me want to buy it just to get rid of that annoying view... the update just sucks.
I like it. Not only do I think it looks pretty nice, it makes sense visually since it would be weird to scroll away the book title only to scroll it back in for the next page.
It would look a lot less jarring if the underlying body text didn’t move as well. Even in digital media, animations still work best when they model the physical world, which our brains evolved to understand. This is why even simple transitions look best when using spring physics vs linear easing functions.
This new animation breaks even the basic the mental model of a “page”. If the goal is to do away with skeuomorphism, I’d much rather have a simple push/slide animation without any shadow or fancy transition . Want the title permanently in view, put it in a top bar or floating element.
What annoys me is that there is more lag in the app. When opening the app just to get in some reading when I have some free time, there is a 1-2 second lag just to open a book that I have been reading. I am on an iPhone 11 Pro. Opening a book should be instantaneous. But it gets slower with each update.
I agree. One of the reasons I chose iOS over Android around 2012 was because it worked really smooth, no stutters, everything is responsive. They are gradually removing it since iOS 7, the contact list was the first victim (you click on it, it displays, half a second after it updates, but you could have clicked a contact already and now you're calling the wrong person).
It was kinda fun in 2010 for a few minutes I guess. But it certainly isn't something worth chaining your book purchases to Apple products for. If you REALLY want this though at least Moon+ Reader on Android has it, both one mimicking Google's and Apple's!
I didn't even realize they had a paginated view, I haven't used that (on Apple Books or Kindle either one) in forever. Scroll view is much better.
My only complaint with the iOS 16 version of Books is that it's way, way too easy to double tap a bookmark into existence. I've gotten good at ignoring it. Kinda like it's too easy to create a section of highlighted text on the Kindle app. Both of these are probably just a case of 'holding it wrong' but whatever.
I actually prefer it the other way around myself. I find pdf that technical books to be better since the equation typesetting, and any other similar things, can be done with a single page size and font in mind. I find that really suffers from trying to reflow when you change the eBooks font size.
I was surprised to see how many people are using the paged view too! Scrolling with dark mode is the only way I read ebooks. Works well in any indoor lighting, and it’s great for reading in bed too.
Not crazy at all. It reduces all the clutter and just the most seamless implementation ever. They have even removed the page numbers they had on the left side of text in last iOS version
They also "broke" the ability to set/remove a bookmark by double-tapping the page. The more Books degrades to become like Kindle, the less incentive I have to buy books from the Apple store.
With Apple: complain loudly and make a case, there are countless examples of that working, including on massive initiatives.
Despite their shortcomings they do indeed read everything sent to /feedback
Getting rid of the ability to export highlights has been insanely frustrating and has meant I can only use this app for reading fiction that I don’t generally highlight.
I highly recommend not to tie your personal happiness to a particular UI/UX choice, in a single App, from a technology provider who does not know you and does not care about you as a person, on a device that you probably shouldn’t spend much time on anyway. Instead, I think it’s more productive to diligently look for alternatives.
Aw come on. I get the HN thirst to knock Apple about absolutely everything, but the page turn animation is utter bullshit.
When I’m reading a real book I don’t see some absurd ‘scrolling over page turn’ - I just turn the page. It’s over in the blink of an eye, and isn’t some “joyful” imaginative experience, at all.
Nope, sorry, you're wrong. The page turning animation was delightful.
If you didn't care for it, you could ignore it, it was fast. But it showed that the designers of iBooks had cared about it being an experience of reading books.
The new animation is just... weird. It's not an actual thing and makes no sense. It doesn't even look like you're yeeting the top page out of the pile since the bottom one moves.
Vast majority of animations are done in the blink of an eye. When done well, you barely notice them, it just feels good. When done poorly (most new page turning animations), it becomes noticeably odd and that's one of the worst qualities for an animation to have.
Like you, I could not care less about the page turning animation. As long as I see the next page it's fine with me.
The thing that prompts me to comment is that this feels like yet another place where the "artfulness" of software is getting optimized out of things. Whatever any of us thinks of the animation, it was clearly the result of clever work by the team putting out the app. The two ways of turning the page give a different feel and have a different character.
I think how apps feel - and the engineering behind making them feel a certain way - often does not get its due. I think we, as an industry, should do more to celebrate people doing things "the hard way" because it's nice - and not dismiss it as "absurd."
It may seem trivial, but I assure you it's valid criticism. FWIW, I've stopped using the Books app on my Ipad in favor of emailing my ebooks to my Kindle account and reading it through the Kindle app.
Why couldn't they have an option to keep the old animation? In 2022, it should be that simple, but of course...
It's not that I loved the old animation, but rather that I can't stand the current one. It's like I'm rotating a deck of cards, taking one off the top of the pile and putting it underneath. Not very pleasant to me, and also not an animation style I've seen used in any other book apps to my knowledge. I wonder why that is?
Overall there are many more practical settings that are available in the new UI. I don't remember everything that wasn't in the previous version, but I don't remember things like line spacing, character spacing, and word spacing. Of course, new features don't have to come at the expense of existing features, especially not when we're comparing page turn animations to text rendering, but as people say, this could be part of a transition to swift, so it's expected that there would be trade-offs in re-implementing features. I'm thinking more people are positively impacted by things like text rendering than page turning.
Rather them work on natural reading of the books with Text To Speech. People with disabilities such as Dyslexia, ADHD, partial or total Blindness have to hobble on with the terrible TTS available. You have to select the text to get it to read, which means you will have to do that each page. A simple play & stop button for "read aloud" would solve this. They love to think about use cases to make things easier for their users, but have they hired disabled people to give comment? This has been a glaring issue to me, and I've told Apple, but nothing ever comes of it. Cool animation though .
Oh Crazy. It is so frustrating, for people with ADHD, in order to have our brains stimulated enough to keep focus, we have to read and hear it at the same time, so our option is to buy it twice.
Kindle added this animation style to their app, and I love using the app more because of it. It was one thing I lived about Apple’s eBooks that I didn’t get on Kindle (but the catalogue and other features made up for it).
I suspect we’ll see a return of the page turn animation before the next full release. It doesn’t make sense for them to leave such a basic feature behind, especially since iBooks is a front end to a revenue stream.
> It doesn’t make sense for them to leave such a basic feature behind, especially since iBooks is a front end to a revenue stream.
The basic features they butchered/implemented for the "front end to revenue stream":
- jarring animation that cannot be turned off
- scrolling is now relegated to a weird small control in settings that has no relation to the actual book you're reading
- "lock orientation" locks orientation in portrait mode
- accessing table of contents is now three taps
- accessing font settings is now three taps
- table of contents + scrolling + searchig + themes + scroll lock + bookmarks ... all of that is accessed through a tiny gray icon that is nearly indistinguishable from surrounding text. Also, this icon is unique, and has never been used anywhere in iOS or MacOS
- closing a book is now a tiny gray x that is almost indistinguishable from the text
All this passed design -> design approval -> engineering managers -> programmers -> qa -> launch check lists.
By the way, when it launched in iOS 16, the close icon and the "kitchen sink" icon would always pe present, they only fixed it a month or two later.
Yup. This is the state of a "frontend to the revenue stream". Done and approved by people who have never read a single book on iOS (and MacOS where it was also butchered), or perhaps have never read a single book in their life, period.
Edit: their animation is also "least effort" attempt: they hide page numbers when animation, then it takes up to two seconds for them to reappear.
> But it genuinely was a feature that made me choose to buy e-books on Apple’s platform instead of anyone else’s — and given how same-y most book stores and reading apps are in the broad strokes, it really is the details that get you locked into an ecosystem.
Although I've used Macs for decades and iPhones since day one, I typically purchase ebooks on third-party platforms. If I buy an Android tablet, a non-Apple computer, or some other device that hasn't been invented yet, I don't want to be locked out of my prior purchases.
It’s great on the iPad mini. I haven’t noticed any eye strain at all with it, is that what you think would be so bad? It seems overblown to me since most tech workers spend 8 hours behind an active display each day.
I know no one at Apple uses iTunes on Windows, but surely these people read books? And yet the iBooks experience has been a disaster for years with little to no improvement.
In some way currently I actually regard that as an advantage – iTunes might have its foibles, but the hard split between e.g. Music and Podcasts that happened on Mac definitively isn't something I'm looking forward to.
That's because I've found the Podcasts section of iTunes actually quite useful for also managing my collection of radio comedy, e.g. to get the nice at-a-glance listened/unlistened episode display. With unified iTunes it's simply a matter of adding those files (which are only rarely native podcasts and usually have been scrounged together from all sorts of various sources) to my music library and then manually setting the media type to "Podcast", but on a Mac post-split-up that no longer works, and the successor Podcasts app apparently allows no manual file management.
So I'd either have to manually hack the database, or more likely set up a fake local podcasts server, or just give up entirely and switch to something else (which might still mean having to set up a fake podcasts server anyway in order to sync the episodes to my phone).
At least on Windows iTunes update and general compatibility aren't as directly tied to the OS itself as on Mac, so if push came to shove, I could just keep on using iTunes – the only slight annoyance would be if compatibility with the iTunes store would eventually break…
I am amazed at the progressive downfall of Apple over UX and UI in their products. Recently, I moved to downgrade my Mac Mini 2018 to Monterey over the horrible performance hit and overheating that I've got with Ventura.
I don't understand how is this possible. Don't let me start about red colored "text" over dark background button. Grrrr....
Someone in Apple HQ must find the old HIG and make it mandatory.
In general I feel the books app got so much worse with the iOS 16 update that it is partly responsible for me selling my iPad to get a dedicated e-reader
honestly, i don’t think books app get better since iOS 12, it is always getting worse.
Either starting in iOS14 or 15, if you have multiple devices and all use sort by most recent read, one or few device will lost that order once in a while and sort the library with a bizarre order and lots of old books with wrong reading progress.
The biggest problem with Apple Books (from a producer point of view) is that they removed the ability to connect dev tools to it. Up until the Catalyst rebuild you could open Safari dev tools, connect it to the Books instance, and use it to inspect CSS, highlight particular elements, and basically do anything you can in a browser.
This might not sound like much, but Books is unfortunately laden with weird bugs that don’t exist in normal Safari. They managed to fix the one I reported about srcset not working for images (it just didn’t display anything) but flex / grid display with 100vh is completely broken, and there’s a bunch more minor things like broken page-break functionality. And the debugging cycle currently is to make changes, repackage the book, reload the book in Books, and hope for the best.
2. Despite deploying their own words to a scroll, the last person buying books on iTunes laments losing a pointless* animation.
* the animation doesn’t semantically enrich the reading experience since it lacks the feeling of the rest of the pages. It merely imitates the paper book experience that might be technically satisfying to see performed once, but is otherwise a perfect example of kitsch.
As a vertical scroller I am indifferent to this decision. What matters to be is what Yomu and GoodLinks offer: changing the line height and exporting highlights.
The default leading in Apple Books is decent, but I switch fonts at a whim and many require adjustments. And nothing is more irritating than copying an excerpt from a book and having to remove the extra text about the title of the book, the book’s author and the copyright information.
Plus the way Yomu exports highlights is really interesting.
In continuous scroll mode, they removed a subtle progress indicator in the margin with a chunky slider control (exactly the same style as used for the volume in Control Center or a smart lightbulb in Home). It's almost comical.
My only complaint with the previous version was that it was too easy for an errant swipe to create a highlight. This has been replaced by every other swipe being interpreted as a double tap, creating a bookmark on every single page.
That's so sad. I used to play with that page turning animation back on my iPhone 4 just because it was so cool.
I hate the era we're in now of changing software to be worse just so they can say they changed it.
It's gotten to the point where any announcement of a software update gets an initial reflexive negative reaction from me, as these days they're more often steps backwards than improvements.
I never got accustomed to reading book on my iPhone It never felt quite right despite (or maybe because of) the skeuomorphism attempt.
Am I the only one thinking the new animation actually looks better? The page seem to quickly fade away with less distractions and might enable to focus more on the text flow.
If anything knowing the interface evolved is actually encouraging me to give it another go.
The old animation was a must-have for those of us who fiddle with edges of pages when reading physical books. Only method of ebook reading I've seen that satisfied that particular I-suspect-uncommon-but-not-rare book-reading behavior. Not the same as running a finger over the corner of the whole block of pages, but close enough.
However during the transition the text is sometimes obfuscated by a huge white space that doesn't exist on a real book that is indeed recto/verso printed.
It's fun for fidgeting but I personally find it way more visually distracting than the new behavior.
Weird, I am on iOS 16 on both my iphone and ipad and i still have the swipe animation for books. Apple doesn't really do much A/B testing so this really kinda surprises me.
Edit: Think I figured it out - looks like PDFs still have the page turn animation on iOS but epubs are using the new animation
Yea I felt the same way and cried internally for a bit and then forgot about it. I appreciate someone writing about it. I really hope they bring it back. I don't think the redesign really brought about any improvements... just change for the sake of change.
As someone who does most reading on an IPad, and was already somewhat reluctant to update: I'm never updating to iOS 16. This along with some other changes have convinced me totally (see, for example, some of the changes listed by
dmitriid)
It's not a simple slide transition, it is some sort of odd slide-out-and-reveal-slide-in-underneath animation that has no analogue to any existing reading experience. A plain sliding transition (like reading a physical scroll) would be an improvement over what they did.
I loved Books ever since I first got an iPhone. Since the iOS 16 update, I’ve been unsatisfied, the UI isn’t as slick. I just started giving Yomu a try, here goes.
Apple devices are nowhere near as playful and fun as they used to be. Source, just had to drag out and tidy my accidental collection of Macs and iPhones including my Mac classic and Powerbook 180 from the 1990s, a Titanium G4, a Powermac 8100, and there's definitely real fun, not just nostalgia, missing from the modern era.
True, but honestly I don't really miss it either. Yes, interfaces used to be whiz-bang, lickable-glossy, mega-3D, skeumorphism etc. But after the initial "wow" wears off, it's all just kind of... busy and distracting.
It took me a while to warm up to "flat design", but now I can't ever see myself (or the industry) going back. By allowing the interface to recede, you allow the content to shine. Generally you want to focus on the document, the photo, the text, the movie -- not the controls around it.
I would pay for that feature. With AI scanning the paragraph text, we might even be able to get relevant illumination images generated on the fly. I want this now, whereas five minutes ago I had never thought of it.
That's not how human works. We love non-functional things around us. I doubt that you live in a white cube.
Our minds are pretty good at focusing on important stuff. We don't need white margins for that. We can focus on important stuff even with non-white margins. And those non-white margins might actually bring some joy when you can't focus anymore, because brain focus is finite.
There's no way for industry not going back. It'll go back. It always did. We move in spiral. We just need to completely forget how good skeuomorphic interfaces were, so companies will sell those again. Probably executed much better.
Then I must be GPT model because those non-functional things are way too distracting.
Jokes aside, I hated the page animation. It was amusing for the first minute but it felt weird to interact with it. Sticky is the only word that comes to mind, but not quite that. Glad it's gone.
This supposed argument of letting the "content" shine makes no real sense, because crappy design doesn't become magically less crappy because it suddenly looks simpler and flatter.
Design is about solving human problems and helping humans accomplish things, not about how it looks.
iOS 6 on iPad is charming to use. I get that people were tired of skeuomorphism and the bright candy colours sell, but I think the muted colours and texture helped with long term use - making it functionally better.
yeah. this was disappointing. I hope to get used to it, but for the moment it really detracts from my very enjoyable little stolen dad moments here and there reading Ian McKuen on my phone at a bar. feels like I'm reading a xeroxed copy of a book.
this is how it works and what matters to apple is huge $ nothing else.
1. people like apple
2. they use it
3. they become part of an apple cult
4. apple makes products worse and worse yet more expensive
5. the zombies still uses and pays, small% will complain, rest not even that
...for example, apple mouse is the worst product on the market. But nooo.. apple zombies won't even think of using anything else
....does the iphone video/cam recorder even in the 2022 have a pause button? i remember it did not have it in 2020 yet in all other phones had it 10 years because you need it
I’m normally sentimental about things, but I couldn’t care less about this one. They’ve updated other features in the app (after about ten years…) and this kitschy little bastard had to go. It was cool when I first saw it on my iPhone 4…
the page turn animation was probably the main reason i bought the original ipad. it was just so delightful. like some others, i miss the skeuomorphism of the original ios.
Exactly. Optimising care and attention to detail out of product design because it's too expensive is one of the reason technology today is absolute crap anywhere you look.
A decade ago I used to view Steve Jobs as an a designer that was a little too full of himself, today I see him as an extinct breed of people that had a vision and didn't compromise in the name of revenue and cutting corners.
Many engineers and managers nowadays think good, opinionated and well-crafted product are a waste of time and money. Shipping early is the only metric that matters, and the various Tim Cooks in charge are a sign of the times.
What's wrong with that sentence? Phones are generally pretty horrific in my experience.
Dog-shit usability compared to a desktop computer, massive brain-draining time-sinking cheap dopamine-spiking apps which add virtually zero value to the world, 99% of which have no real reason of being an "app" in the first place.
You can stay on iOS 15. Nobody shoves iOS 16 down your throat. Apple even backports fixes for most dangerous vulnerabilities for quite some time.
What you can't do is downgrade once you've found that you're not happy with upgrade. That's the most bizarre Apple thing. Unless you can jailbreak. Not sure if it works nowadays, back in days I was very happy to downgrade to iOS 6 with jailbreak on my iPhone 4S.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but I assume customization in this context is the choice to pick what updates are implemented in your session/device.
I like it in theory but supporting it can be unwieldy, especially for design-led orgs that like to tinker and introduce changes a lot (not dissing, just not my preference). Like how many versions and combinations do you support? I've worked in an app company once, and supporting web, iOS, and Android was somewhat annoying enough. Can't imagine adding in support for old versions.
OTOH it could force more deliberation and discipline on the part of product teams before going all-in on whatever shiny new object caught their eye this month
For better or worse, whimsy and playfulness are majorly out in terms of design these days. I thought the page curl was a nicely done bit of frippery in an app that is really a pain to use. for me I’m afraid are many worse things about the app than removing that animation. Search is bad, no way to open more than one book at once, the list goes on.
This is a good change but it doesn’t go far enough. Infinite scroll is obviously the best way to read long form content. Unfortunately, most book sales are by people who like the idea of reading books more than actually reading
You think? I tend to find I get "lost" more easily in a big scrolling document, particularly if I'm coming back to it several times before finishing, as would usually be the case with a book.
In the case of e-ink e-readers you also face the issue that their screen updating tech is really better suited to full page replacements then line- or pixel-level scroll, though of course that doesn't apply to Apple's devices.
"Obviously the best way" is probably too strong, though for me I do much prefer scroll mode for reading novels. And I like reading on my phone, because then I can read a few pages anywhere I want.
Disagree specifically for the case of pre-16 Apple Books.
The ability to fiddle with page corners, half-flip pages then flip them back, that kind of thing, made it much more like reading a real book, and it was my favorite way to read ebooks, followed at a distance by e-ink readers, and then, very distantly, by every other non-e-ink way to read ebooks that wasn't Apple Books.
Not joking that the page flip animation was the thing that made the Apple version far and away my favorite way to read ebooks. The new animation doesn't just lose that quality, it's also notably bad even among the all-some-degree-of-bad animations of reader apps in general (not counting pre-16 Apple Books).
I remember the time when it was "reading books on something without paper and ink is goofy in the first place". :)
I gave up on e-ink readers a few years ago and donated a couple of them. I am reading books in eletronic format on iPhones. It's just more practical, I don't need to carry a second and usually larger device with me, and ... I don't need an external light when it's too dark to read. Plus, the newer iPhones with OLED displays are pretty good for reading.
Totally agree. The ability to read on my phone has been such a boon. My close up vision has degraded to the point where I need readers for a paperback, but readers make me ill. The OLED screen on the phone means I can read in the dark without lighting up the room, which is handy since I often read in the middle of the night if insomnia wakes me up.
No
I read on my iPhone which I keep in my pocket - I have that with me and don't need to carry a larger thing in a bag. But I don't use Apple's Books it just feels wrong - I used Stanza and when Amazon broke it I switched to Marvin
I do use ereaders and if I travel for some time I'll use it..
It's a bold statement, but I agree. Reading is an evening activity for me, that means the phone is put away, computer is in the office, TV is off. There will be no reading on any display that is backlit, that would defeat the purpose for me.
I understand that it's useful to sometimes have access to books on a computer, phone or table, but that's for professional use in my mind, and not a replacement for a physical book in the same sense a device with e-ink displays are.
Even if you read on the iPad, I don't fully understand why you'd want the page animations anyway. Still the complain in the article is weird, just accept it and move on, if you're waiting for Apple to switch back I feel your going to wait a very long time.
It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.