It's just that as any average user, I never bothered to read the documentation and therefore I was no aware of this feature.

Now that I know about it, it seems to work OK, but it is not intuitive: as said above, the behavior that I expected was sliding a finger in one direction to go the next or previous page.

But given the time spent to render a page, it is better to use a tap or an existing physical button.
An animated icon specifying that the action as been recorded and is processed would be useful though.