Page flipping effect in eBooks

Question

I am new to the world of ebook publishing. I have created an ebook of format .epub and I am wondering what can I do to enable a page flipping effect when user navigates from one page to another, on a touch or non-touch device.

Here is a Wikipedia article that classifies ebook readers based on page turning effect capabilities, which hints that it depends on the reader app and not on the epub XHTML. I also found numerous softwares on the web that claim to convert to some kind of flash format and thus enabling the page flipping effect. So here is the crux of the problem:

What do I need to do get the page flipping effect experience in my ebook? Is it natively supported by the reader app or do I need to add something to my epub XHTML to enable this effect? I don't want to convert my ebook to Flash or any other format.

Answer 1

Page flipping¹ is normally supported by a reading application (not necessarily by all). For this to be effective on a software reader, or specific hardware reader, the refresh rate of the screen needs to be relatively high, to be able to draw and redraw all of the intermediate stages of the 'flipping' page.

So some ebook readers (I would assume most e-Ink based ones) will not have that kind of refresh speed. But tablets and desktop PC based readers might. In the former, no amount of JavaScript or Flash would help to get the effect you want.

¹ _{On a personal note: I have been forced to get these page turn effects in PDF files of catalogues of products. And it is a guaranteed way of losing me as a customer, if this cannot be switched off, and to make me annoyed customer if it is on by default.}