Part 6: On the nature of ‘book’-ishness
This week is one I’ve been awaiting for quite some time. Really since before I even started this process. It’s also the first time I’m posting something that I know is broken in a lot of browsers. But where it works properly, it works really well and I kind of love it. This week, we go from simply putting text on the web to making it feel like a book.
I’d had the idea that something like this might work for quite a while, but there were too many missing parts. Finally about a year and a half ago my friend John Berry asked me about collaborating on a project to create a web-based book for a friend of his. This was the push needed to see how much could be done now that the web had advanced a bit more. Turns out it’s come farther than I’d realized.
While we’ve been able to add quite a number of typographic details on websites for a while now, it’s not how I’d like to read a book. I’ve always felt the missing part of longer-form reading was the notion of a paged experience (like a book), rather than scrolling down a web page (like, well, a web page). The reason I think this matters is it creates a unit of content within the whole that helps define place and progress. A single long scroll makes it really difficult to gauge progress, and I think contributes to greater reading fatigue due to not having that little break that comes with completing a page…
