I am no particular JS expert, so take this post with a grain of salt.
I tried the JQuery swipe implementation a couple months ago using the JQuery Mobile library jquery.mobile-1.5.0-alpha.1.min.js, which was my understanding of where the swipe code is implemented. Unfortunately that library also did a fair bit of mucking around with my code, changing CSS values to try to do a mobile makeover of sorts. I ended up dumping that implementation though I did later see references to how to tell JQuery Mobile to stop doing that, which I didn’t try.
Instead I found a good JS implementation by user ‘gigawatt’ at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264072/detect-a-finger-swipe-through-javascript-on-the-iphone-and-android that I’m currently using. Note that you likely want to implement page prev/next via arrow keys in a similar way (ie, have the JS parse your prev/next buttons and grab the link), for those users with keyboards. I wouldn’t consider this novice level JS coding, but as I say I am not a JS expert and implemented it.