When Instapaper developer Marco Arment updated his popular offline reading app for the iPad, something was different. Instapaper's normal pagination action – rendering single pages of text in place of scrolling – could be swapped. Specifically, an off-angle transitional fade that runs in two-tenths of a second could be replaced with an iBooks-style "flip," complete with a curled edge, and translucent text rendered on the opposing page.

"It has a strong appeal to a lot of people." Arment told Wired in an e-mail interview. "It demos well and it's extremely tactile."

Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content. Some of these visual cues are comically exaggerated (iBooks), some are more subdued (Instapaper's "Fast Pagination" action) and others fit somewhere in between (Flipboard). But each presents a challenge to developers attempting to blend the tactility of real-world pages with the digitally native tablet aesthetic.

When the iPad debuted in 2010, the animated page-flipping in iBooks was a crowd pleaser. And Apple has included a module in the iPad SDK that allows developers to render that same animation in their apps. But why exactly do developers rely on such an outdated paradigm when the tablet interface offers up a blank slate for innovation?

"Page flip is a spectacular transition," says Greg Nudelman, a user experience expert writing for DesignCaffeine. "It's classy. It works well for magazine browsing, book reading and other media consumption tasks, because it mimics the real world so well."

Other developers we spoke with admit that the iBooks animation is overwrought – it takes too much time to render and is generally perceived as a show-piece rather than a feature. Still, it continues to endure despite being a blatant anachronism on a platform that has nothing to do with pulp and paper.

"Pagination is obviously an artificially bolted-on construct on the iPad and iPhone, especially when the source content is unpaginated web articles," Arment says. "The most 'authentic' web-article advancement method, to me, is just scrolling. But I can't deny that I like pagination better. Scrolling through long articles just feels tedious."

The iPad Kindle app from Amazon doesn't offer a traditional page flip, opting instead for a sideways scrolling transition from page to page. Flipboard, the curated social media reader for the iPad, uses something in between, allowing users to virtually flick through various streams, rendering a rigid "page" when advancing through Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and other supported services.

Interestingly, when Flipboard was released for the iPhone earlier this year, the developers opted to retain a variant of that animation, even though it generally doesn't scale well to the iPhone's smaller screen.

"The screen size on the iPhone is simply too small to comfortably accommodate the swipe gesture necessary to convey the magic and physicality [of iBooks]," Nudelman told Wired. "The whole page flipping transition quickly became rather tedious. It was much more efficient and less disorienting to simply scroll down (Safari app) or slide (Kindle app) for more content."

While scrolling still seems to be the preferred method of reading and advancing through text on tablets and other slab devices, developers have yet to come up with something truly original for the digital space. Arment admits as much: "Even though I think the iBooks animation is too long and complex, it has a strong appeal to a lot of people."