On Thursday a tidbit of news circulated around the Web that Microsoft had filed a patent application in late 2009 hoping to lay claim to the look and feel of page turns on a touchscreen device.

The patent application states that when “one or more pages are displayed on a touch display” a “virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page.” Just like real pages in a paper book.

Many bloggers speculated that if Microsoft is awarded the patent for page turns, Apple would have to remove, or license, the interface technique it currently uses in its iBooks application.

But the page turn doesn’t necessarily make sense in digital form and seems to be an unnecessary and archaic carryover from print.

Of course many might disagree with me on this: it is a topic of debate among fans of user interface design and digital books.

Jason Kottke, blogger and Web designer, had this to say about the iBooks page turn:

The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?

Craig Mod, a book designer, also noted earlier this year that the page turn is something of a relic: “The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone.”

The Design blog Design Dare takes the opposite approach, defending the page turn if it’s executed correctly. The author writes that page flips on digital devices need to be extremely fast, not too fanciful and easy to execute.

So what’s better than a page flip? Ironically, it could be the page scroll, an interaction that was essentially eliminated when long print scrolls were replaced centuries ago by bound books.

Before I started writing for the Bits blog I worked at The Times as a user interface specialist, exploring interaction designs for reading digital text on e-readers.

After a number of design experiments and mock-up concepts I found that the page turn served one purpose: to remind readers of the printed page while they use a digital screen. But it wasn’t necessarily the most efficient way to read long-form text. After a while, the digital page flip can seem annoying and inefficient.

In the end some of the best results came from scrolling through content, where the reader’s eyes don’t have to adjust to the page, but instead the page adjusts to them.





This post has been updated to clarify that Microsoft filed a patent application, not a patent.