Mimicking the interactions offline is always popular in the world of computers.

Page-flips are one of the most popular ones of them in web design. They are implemented very successfully in Flash, many websites, documents, magazines are being created/published each day.

With the capabilities of new web technologies, we can also expect them to be accomplished using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript (remember "20 Things I Learned"? It is also open source).

There are several easy-to-use jQuery plugins that offer a good page-flip experience and help creating book-like interfaces. Here they are:

Turn.js

A jQuery plugin that has lovely and smooth page flip transitions.

The first page acts as the cover and the rest can be browsed by simply turning the pages from any desired corner.

Turn.js is only 15kb, works on mobile & tablet browsers as well and makes use hardware acceleration.

jPageFlip

jPageFlip is a highly customizable jQuery plugin for book-like interfaces.

It can -optionally- flip pages on mouse clicks and has support for transparent + semi-transparent image files.

P.S. The plugin performs better on WebKit browsers.

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Telerik, a very talented company that mostly creates resources for the Microsoft products, is sharing a set of 3 free Silverlight controls: Book, Gauge and TileView.

They are natively built on top of Silverlight 4 and have the capabilities of the platform, such as clipboard integration, right-click support, multi-touch support and more.

Book

A "page turning” component to offer an experience like browsing a real book. The flip animations are smooth for better user experience.

Gauge

A great component for dashboards or any other place to use graphical indicators.

It has a rich collection of circular, linear and numeric gauge types with powerful customization capabilities.

TileView

The control enables users to interactively browse through the different panes with rich information.

They can be expanded, collapsed or rearranged panes to achieve the best layout they need.

TileView component offers built-in animations, drag-and-drop rearrangement of its tiles and full control over the different tiles states.