Quote:
Originally Posted by Ransom
I've noticed several comments in book reviews at Amazon where people were complaining about this e-book or that not containing a hyperlinked (working) TOC, only to be chided by later reviewers saying that he/she has to scroll down to the TOC.
Obviously, some readers expect to see a TOC right off the bat, perhaps right after the book's title and by-line. And equally obvious is the fact that many of these books have a greyed-out TOC in the "go to" menu of their Kindles even though they did in fact have a working TOC within the text itself, probably after the preface. (Of course the people who created the mobi/azw are partly to blame for not making sure they had a TOC that wasn't greyed-out.)
I'm wondering if it would perhaps be more fitting to move the TOC up after the title/by-line though with e-books?
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I think having a page of linked ToC entries is wrong. We don't need it. We never have needed it. It's extraneous. And when we get eBooks that have ToC entries linked back to the ToC, that's even more wrong. All we need is the external ToC (toc.ncx). ePub does not need an internal ToC. I blame Amazon's substandard conversion software for this. And I think publishers should stop kowtowing to the poor Amazon conversion software and instead get Amazon to fix it to generate a proper ToC from toc.ncx. It can be done and it should be done so ePub uses don't get an internal ToC that we don't need and don't want.