[Harlequins_Back]

Your experiences are completely the opposite of many others-- for example, when I tried my character creation session, everyone commented on the paging back-and-forth frustration in order to accomplish anything; this was even with two hardcopies and three computers with pdfs. Incidentally, these were all gaming veterans, who can complete 300 point GURPS characters in under an hour with some assistance.

As for the organizational issues, here's a very specific example. In the combat section, there are 29 basic actions listed, on pages 135-138. In the same section, there are 27 page references. So, on average, the section on the 29 basic actions only really goes over the rules for 2 of them. (Okay, it's not quite that bad, but you get the idea.) There's too many page references, too much back-and-forth, to make the game run smoothly.

I read gaming books exactly as you say; and while it seemed quite straightforward at first, you need to flip through too many pages to really get a handle on a given topic. I remember reading through the Matrix chapter, and thinking: "It works like this"-- until I tried it, and realized I was thinking about something from another section. So, I had to read that section, which required anoter set of page references, and so on. I found this to be a terrible problem-- sometimes the differences were subtle, but they could end up being significant.