"It's user-hostile, why did you think this was a good idea?"
I'm Manning's Publisher and I thought it was a good idea. We obviously implemented it badly if you guys think it is "hostile." Also, we have failed to explain WHY it's done this way: by getting scrambled content first and unscrambling as you scroll you are able to look at any piece of the book that you choose--you're not forced to look at the one or two chapters selected by the publisher and offered for free. The mechanism allows that without giving away the entire content for free. If you do look at it in scrambled form, you still get a sense of what it covers because much of it remains unscrambled: the heads of all levels, all code, all figures and code, and figure/code comments and captions.
After seeing this discussion we changed the unscrambling animation--it's not a rotation anymore but simply a replacement. Let us know. Also, the amount of time we let people read unscrambled content is limited. Maybe it needs to be longer?
We keep trying ideas that we hope will please our readers; sometimes we are going to fail.
After seeing this discussion we changed the unscrambling animation--it's not a rotation anymore but simply a replacement. Let us know. Also, the amount of time we let people read unscrambled content is limited. Maybe it needs to be longer?
We keep trying ideas that we hope will please our readers; sometimes we are going to fail.