TL;DR: Did you study at highschool in the past? Did you use a textbook, and annotate it with bookmarks? If so, then look at the side of the book with the bookmarks, and that's your ebook reader's new "page selection" interface.

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When holding a real book, or textbook, we generally select the general location of the book and then flip to the correct page.

This kind of movement is often lost when we browse ebook in a tablet. The closest I seen is the action of swiping the screen to flip to next page. This is not bad, but when you need to jump to a particular section of the book, its is still very annoying, especially if the pdf doesn't have an encoded index to browse.

I would like to see a good reader app have 'swipe' to flip, and that is already done so that is good. However there is another concept I haven't seen implemented yet.

Instead of having to type in the page number, it would be nice if we could have the option of seeing a "virtual spine" of the entire ebook that pops out to 1/4 of the reading. Each "line" represents an average color of 1/8th of the page for easy identification (this will pick up "section headers" easily as they tend to have minimal amount of text). The user then tap roughly the area of the book we want, then manually flip to the correct page. If rough selection doesn't get us within 10 pages of our desired page, then for books with more than, say... "100 pages" will have a second 'tap' where the spine is zoomed in a bit further (with maybe some page 'peeking'.)

bigsleep <--- he suggested that the "side book" view could also show "bookmark" tabs peeking out (much like the tabs we put on our textbook)

This will help very much in reading textbook on an ebook format.

Let us know if such exist already, or if you will implement it!
-- mofosyne, Jun 20 2013

<brainfart> "Looosy, you got some splining to do" </b>
-- FlyingToaster, Jun 20 2013


yea spine of a book is probably a bad wording. I was more referring to the 'side of the book' that we unconsciously 'tab' to, and stick book marks on. Any better idea?

Also good idea about bookmark.
-- mofosyne, Jun 21 2013


It's a good idea. The normal slider doesn't work for me.
-- DIYMatt, Jun 24 2013


It's called the fore-edge.
-- pocmloc, Jun 24 2013


Like this? http://imgur.com/a/juKPS
-- harryhutton, May 27 2015


YES please!
-- white, May 31 2015



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