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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

What I learned is that the web is not a book and trying to use real life ideas in webdesign doesn't always work out.

There's an arrow to go back, but some funny page-curl-click thing to go forward. Oh, and a button to open the book.

Took me a while to figure out the page curl thing. The first time, I got it to change by randomly clicking everywhere. Even worse was that it follows you for a while, then gives up, making you think you're doing something wrong.

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I have to disagree: I think this one works out just fine. And there actually is an arrow to go forward as well.

For me, pagination makes reading long documents a lot easier than scrolling. For example, I love the pagination feature in Instapaper.

Also, this is the prettiest thing I have seen coming from Google. By far.

All canonical ways of page navigation work. There are large forward and backward buttons, the arrow keys work and the page curl is just an added gimmick. You don’t need to use it. I clicked through the whole book without ever noticing the page curl. Did only you have that problem or your upvoters, too? I would think that would be very strange because this book seems to to work exactly like all other such page navigation interfaces on the web.

If you want page navigation this is the way to do it.

>All canonical ways of page navigation work.

I'm aware of three canonical ways of page navigation: scrolling, page down, space bar.

None of those work.

I agree that the interface was intuitive and at no point did I have any actual difficulty using it, but I'm not exactly impressed with a page that takes a lot of text and then crams it into two columns (WTF? whose bright idea was that?) in a tiny box with bad fonts surrounded by a vast sea of grey and then makes me have to click to advance to the next post-it sized page.

Agreed. The problem with page-curl in this case is that the left-hand-side of the book is a blank page. This means that when you're "curling" the page, you don't see a a bunch of text/images mid-transformation (mid "curl"). Also, there is no transparency at all to the "paper" - it's totally opaque. If it were semi-transparent, you would see the other side of the page bleeding through, giving some context/reality to the curling.

I agree with you. Moreover, by creating one's own UI, something other will break. For example, I can't close my Better HN for Chrome extension on this page, because the upper bar (with search box) over-drawn the upper part of the extension window (which normal website don't do).

It looks beautiful and everything, but still, please don't do things this way - don't mess with browser nagivation. That I think should be the first thing one should learn about browsers & the web.

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