An exciting new iPad app called Inkling has recently come to the App Store. Inkling is a beautiful textbook reader with a built-in bookstore. It’s simple to search, annotate content, and browse by chapter and section. You can even subscribe to friends’ annotations and see them alongside your own! Best of all, the interaction is fluid and perfectly suited for the iPad. The end-to-end user experience has been meticulously thought through – the whole app reeks of attention to detail. Something that Inkling does uniquely well is page navigation - ironically, by getting rid of pages altogether. There’s been a lot of discussion and experimentation on how best to build interactions for reading long-form texts on a touch device. So far, I haven’t been too happy with any of them. For example, let’s look at how the most popular book reader on the iPad approaches this problem.

iBooks

Despite its billing as a revolutionary device, Apple’s book reader for iPad is endearingly anachronistic. Pages turn exquisitely with a swipe. Text rests on a background that looks just like pages of an open book. iBooks was designed to ease the transition from reading printed to electronic books, and there are good reasons to do that. But, the trouble with rendering text on virtual pages is that the pages themselves are meaningless. Increase the font size and the text reflows to create many more of them. This is not just an academic objection. There is information in the fixed placement of text on a printed page. When we read it, we form subconscious spatial relationships between passages and their locations on a page. I’ve often been able to find a word I had read but couldn’t remember just by scanning a spot on the pages as I flip though them. This is even easier with textbooks because the section headings and images serve as visual landmarks.

When you change fonts or resize the text, words reflow across pages.

So, is there a way of navigating digital text that encourages spacial memory and fully embraces the iPad’s affordances, all without packing any unnecessary skeuomorphic baggage? Yes, and Inkling has done it for textbooks.

Inkling

When you open a textbook in Inkling, you see a table of contents where chapters are arranged left-to-right in a scrollable view, with sections headers below each chapter.

Chapters are arranged horizontally and sections vertically. Tapping a section takes you to it.

You read chapters from top to bottom, swiping vertically to scroll down as you go, a habit that’s second nature to any iPad user. The chapters’ contents are divided logically into sections, and visually into what Inkling calls cards. Cards can be of any length and are arranged vertically, so that when you scroll past the bottom of one card, the next one pops up.

To keep track of your position within the chapter, a little white dot on the left moves along a series of tracks whose length represents the length of each card. At a glance, you can tell how far into a section (and chapter) you’ve read. When you move between sections, the white dot jumps tracks to follow you. Brilliant!

A little white dot on the left shows your position within the current section and chapter.

What I love most about this implementation is that it’s an extension of Apple’s own screen position indicator, used throughout iOS (and elsewhere). In Apple’s version, the gray dots indicate all of the available home screens you can swipe to and the white dot is the screen you’re currently looking at.

iPad home screen. Gray dots indicate the number of home screen. The white dot is the screen you’re currently on.

In essence, Inking extrudes the gray dots into bars to represent the length of the cards. I hope someone writes an open source library of this position indicator. It’s just too good an idea not to be shared.

The total effect of this kind of book layout is that it does away with pages altogether. That’s right, a book without pages. And who needs them? In a digital environment, where you’re free to resize and reflow text, pages are a meaningless metaphor. Worse, they lie by implying affordances we’re familiar with in printed books, when they don’t exist. With Inkling’s cards, on the other hand, resizing text doesn’t change their number or relative size. They promise exactly what they deliver: an inspired reading experience invented for a tablet.