EDIT: Apparently the book thing linked isn't actually made with the book thing? I am confused and feel like an asshole now.

I strongly dislike your book thing.

Why?

* Animations manage to drop frames on my brand-new flagship Android phone.

* Pageflip animation (subjectively) doesn't even look very good.

* Can only imagine how much battery power is getting used drawing that animation.

* Gesture recognition is a bit dodgy, occasionally had to swipe several times

* Hijacked back button, meaning I had to search through my history to go back and find this comment to complain

* Wastes a hilarious amount of previous screen real estate on negative space, especially combined with browser chrome; and because it doesn't scroll, the browser chrome is never hidden. https://postimg.cc/cg6JvZGh/12615d74

Honestly really sorry to be so harsh- but at least on mobile, for me, this is perhaps the worst reading experience I could imagine- well, at least there aren't any ads.

I understand that you've probably worked quite hard on this, but in its current state, for mobile, at least on my device, it's bad.

I looked at the metrics on my dashboard. You were trying to flip through multiple pages quickly-- as in you went in with an intent to 'surf the web capriciously' and not with an intent of really reading the book. I'm sorry that initial mindset to glance through headlines quickly will have a significant impact on your overall reading experience when it comes to books.

The back button isn't hijacked either. It remembers the page you're on exactly as it is, as you progress through the book from one webpage to another. Other things like animations and page flipping etc. can be turned off, so those things are customizable but on battery thing I'll check again even I remember that the pagination interface with full animations run on 60 FPS or higher. There are probably some areas on the renderer where we can improve or may be use Houdini instead to achieve native level of performance but I'm yet to explore those paths.

Unused real estate -- I agree with you here. The new iPhones are significantly longer than the previous generations, and this exacerbates the problem. But I think it's not unfixable, thanks for the feedback!

> You were trying to flip through multiple pages quickly-- as in you went in with an intent to 'surf the web capriciously' and not with an intent of really reading the book. I'm sorry that initial mindset to glance through headlines quickly will have a significant impact on your overall reading experience when it comes to books.

If you are going to design e-readers, you should read Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. Leafing through a book and jumping back in forth is a very important part starting to get into a book, and it is the only way to accurately decide whether you actually want to read a book or not.

thanks for the recommendation, i’ll definitely check it out!

I think part of my impression was just a bad choice of book to link- I was checking it out as a reader, and so, to read a book which opens with installation instructions... yeah, i'm going to flip through that quite quickly! That probably hurt your animation performance- do you, like, render the next page to a canvas for the pagination animation, so when I was flipping through quickly, scanning it, the rendering couldn't keep up- going through it more slowly, does seem to drop less frames, though it does occasionally stutter- not nearly as problematic, though.

The hijacking I referred to...

Okay, I get linked from HN, read a few pages. I press back- it goes back a page. In the book. After tens of back button presses, I got irritated, and just searched my browser history for your comment.

I think the issue I ran into is mostly that you have made a PWA eBook reader, and I expected a book as a website. When I read 20 3-paragraph chunks of text, I very much do not want to press Back 20 times.

Now, if I bought a book, and installed this as a native app- probably helping performance too- I'd be alright with this- if the perf and screen space issues were fixed, I would be happy.

But as a website to read text on, it's not great in its current form, at least on mobile.

If you want to show other folks this, I might suggest linking to the home page and letting them select a book. This might get them in the mindset of "I am opening a book in an app", and not "I am visiting a link to a website with a book on it.". And please make sure the book itself opens in a new tab- so that, if they read a few dozen pages, they don't need to press the back button dozens of times to return to the page that linked them to the web app!

The settings for animations, etc- again, going to find settings is something i'd do in the context of an eBook reader app, but not something I'd really consider for a website.

Sorry for being so harsh- I just had a really terrible experience, likely largely because of my incorrect expectations (perf and whitespace aside), and wanted to make sure that came across properly. I assume most of the interesting stuff you've done has been on the "how do I lay out a book for (such and such a device and context), with diagrams, code blocks, inline images, etc, get reflow working nicely..." and not "having laid out a book into pages, how do I let a user flip through those pages"- but the latter has to be at least alright for me to be able to pay attention to the former!

This is super helpful, thanks! :-)