Revenge of the quote (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Victor Steinbok]

It would actually be much better on a screen if done properly. The
problem is clearly the software and not the hardware (or the electronic
version). Consider, for example, a version of reader software that would
display footnotes on mouseover. The same is true about electronic
textbooks--they tend to treat the material in linear fashion, as if it
were still on paper. There is a reason why we have HYPERtext markup
languages--it's to turn linear print materials into non-linear
electronic ones. Most authors and publishers fail at that task. This
does not mean that this cannot be done correctly--consider, for example,
how financial news sites (Yahoo Business, CBS MarketWatch--well, what
used to be CBS MarketWatch) display company stock information on
mouseover. That's the way to do footnotes, in a nutshell.

     VS-)

On 8/16/2012 11:22 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:
> ...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.
> ...

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