Revenge of the quote

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Thu Aug 16 17:35:56 UTC 2012


At 8/16/2012 11:22 AM, you wrote:
>And reading books with heavy end notes (whether at the end of the
>chapter or book) just about has to be done in a paper version, with
>paper bookmarks.  I'm slowly going through Robert Caro's biography of
>Lyndon Johnson on a tablet, and the reading software doesn't accommodate
>flipping back and forth every time you hit a quote very easily.

Hear, hear.  One reason I haven't gone to ebooks.  Although using two
bookmarks coordinatedly is a bit annoying.  Perhaps the only
advantage of footnotes over endnotes. (I still prefer endnotes --
footnotes clutter the text pages, especially when interesting --
meaning "long".)

Bill's complaint about tablets and reading software is similar to one
made by the book index writers' community -- it's not easy to go from
the index to the text.  (At least for some ebooks.)  However, there
is no theoretical or theological bar -- the underlying text format
allows for live links -- see Wikipedia's footnote structure; it's the
book publishers and the software that don't enable that.

Joel

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