Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content.

Ben Brooks admits to feeling the same thing I feel:

I like the iBooks page flip — oddly enough.

I know I’m not “supposed to”, but this is at least one instance where I like the skeuomorphic design. Reading books has always been an intimate experience to me and I like a) retaining something of the original experience and b) having a visual feedback of progress. When you think about what reading text should be in a strictly non-skeuomorphic design, it’d be like reading an article, just vertically-oriented text scrolling all the way to the end. That’d be horrible.

Unless maybe it looked like a big scroll. But I don’t think that resonates with a lot of people.