HN isn't that great on a touch screen either. I guess pg doesn't use a tablet because the comments link is too small and awkwardly placed for a finger.

I've become very adept at zoom&tap. In fact I probably do it about as fast postioning the pointer with my laptop's trackpad. I agree it'd be nice not to have to zoom before tapping.

Yes, absolutely so. Amazingly, iReader, from Apple, for the iPad, uses this antipattern in the critical main navigation bar! It disappears instantly and one has to click randomly at the top of the screen to get it to reappear, then try to press the tiny button that takes you back to the table of contents before the whole thing rolls up again after a delay of a second or two. Very frustrating. This sort of nonsense is bad enough when one has to hover with a mouse. But when there is no hovering available on a device and one finds key interface elements are invisible and must be unhidden by clicking randomly, one must wonder what sort of monkeys they got working there, or at least what their background in UI design is.

That’s not how iBooks actually works. (That doesn’t get Apple off the hook, though. You encountered the problem so it’s a valid one. Confusion about how something works is definitely not the user’s problem, it’s the developer’s.)

The navigation bar only disappears automatically after you selected a book in your library. It is displayed for a few seconds to show that there are controls. After it disappeared you can make it appear by taping anywhere. It works analogous to the video player.

So it’s consistent with other navigation controls that don’t have to and probably shouldn’t be displayed all the time.

Once you tap the text to make the navigation bar show up it won’t disappear automatically – ever – at least as long as you are reading the same book and don’t go back to your library, no matter where you switch to.

One of the problems with the current behavior is that anywhere doesn’t really mean anywhere inside iBooks. The left and right margins are reserved for turning the page. That can frustrate users who want to make the controls appear. If they tap the wrong place they turn the page instead of making the controls appear. There is no obvious demarcation about safe places to tap. Making the controls disappear when playing a video works better because users really can tap anywhere. There are no unsafe spots.

Here is how I would change it: I would just not hide it by default. Users would still be able to hide it by taping on the text.

Ahhhhhhh. Thanks. OK, so actually I now see that single (one-finger) clicking makes it go away AND makes it come back. It wasn't actually fading on its own because of a fade out hideaway timer, it's just that I was touching the pages.

And I wasn't having success bringing it back consistently because it doesn't listen to clicks along the very top of the page.

...and heaven help anyone using JAWS on such an interface.

Accessibility is often ignored by website designer. That's very unfortunate.