Comment by dredmorbius
2 days ago
I'm not claiming that physical books have all the properties of digital ones, or vice versa.
But there are reasonable affordances to a practical extent within both formats.
I have a large print collection, and a much larger digital one, presently largely on an Onyx BOOX ebook reader. I'm well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations on both systems.
(I've discussed the BOOX device fairly extensively in previous HN comments for those interested.)
Reasonable affordance is fine, that's not what I was arguing against (nor you), but the obvious downside of flipping pages: it's not "very quick, easy" (especially in those huge dictionaries!)
That's where tabbed thumb cuts / index notches are useful:
<https://cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt3508.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index>
Image: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index#/media/File:Blacks...>
Those may be cut in, or self-applied as with index tabs:
The entire notion of a tabbed interface in the computer sense derives from index tabs:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)>
They are useful, but relatively bad: you realize there can be book-width worth of pages within a single letter in a dictionary? So all you've done is produced a regular book without any thumb navigation, so none of the physical virtues will help you find the specific word fast
Besides, these are impossible to implement for anything dynamic, so they aren't even useful at all in most of the cases
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