Comment by eviks
2 days ago
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!)
2 days ago
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
If you're seeking a specific word, looking that up is a skill which can be trained and developed. Hint: binary search.
If you're referencing between two or more sections of a book, bookmarks, index cards, stickies, tabs, etc., are all there for you.
Source: old school printed book research.