Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
When displayed it looks like a book but it is not a book when used as a look up dictionary. There has to be a rapid indexing mechanism that leads directly to the area of interest and it needs to be displayed as an overlay to whatever book you are reading, thus it looks like a book but does not act like a book. It is a database that displays like a book.
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If it quacks like a duck...
Dictionary is used as a reference but much more than just a quick overlay. There should be a standard way to quickly link to all dictionary entries so that reader software in question can index the dictionary. The problem with iBooks is that their dictionary format is unknown, thus there is no way I can make my own dictionary. It has no dictionary support, it simply has some in-built dictionaries.
Even if they supported 3rd party dictionaries in some proprietary format, I wouldn't want to buy or create a new dictionary for each device just because the developer used a slightly different scheme. Probably all it needs is defining some tags based on epub format and calling it epub dictionary specification or extension.