Quote:
Originally Posted by jemkeith
Pratchett doesn't use chapters in the paper books either.
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Ah, that's different. If there's a single continues flow of text without a single interruption of
any kind, not much can be done about it. This may well be
intended by writers sometimes; a famous Czech novelette by Bohumil Hrabal was written as a single
sentence.
What I have found, is that many books that may not be dividing the texts into chapters
explicitly, at least use structure in a way where additional spacing is inserted between two successive paragraphs. In each such location (or at least in some of them), the e-book producer might jump right in and insert a (non-explicit)
section break there, if nothing else. E-reader software generally handles EPUB books better if they are split into several sections = HTML files of reasonable length in kilobytes (let's say, 10 to 30 kilobytes), instead of the entire text of the EPUB being contained in a
single HTML file. Then, while the book would still have no explicit Table of Contents structuring the book text, when using smart e-reader software like Marvin, you could at least switch to a listing of
sections instead of a listing of chapters. The issues when browsing back and forth inside the book, of the variety you were describing, would then be less likely to occur.
By the way, for heavily footnoted books, I've been maintaining that the ideal solution (for Marvin, too) would be to enable
split-screen display of books, allowing you to view two different locations of the same book (or even two different books) at the same time.
So, you might open a smaller pane and have footnotes displayed there. That sub-pane might perhaps be visible in response to a toggle button: "Show/Hide Secondary Pane". That way, you would never again need to switch back and forth between the footnotes section and the main text -- moreover, it often eases the understanding of the main text you are reading, if you can view
both the main text,
and the text of the footnote
simultaneously. (For related discussion, see
here.)
For reading difficult scholarly books, I have therefore adopted the practice of opening the book on 2 tablets: my primary tablet (iPad 3) is permanently displaying the main text, while my secondary tablet (Nexus 7) may be permanently displaying the footnotes section. It's a bit unwieldy to have to keep two tablets at hand like that -- but it may be
less unwieldy than having to go back and forth between the main book text and the footnotes section all the time. (This would be easier in Marvin if, in addition to the Back button, Marvin also gave us a Forward button; those two buttons would be easier to hit than having to hit the small footnote links precisely all the time -- which is especially difficult to accomplish on the iPhone.)