Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
I'm a great believer in an actual (html) TOC at the front of the book. When I began putting my out-of-print books on Amazon's Kindle platform, I realized that what I should be doing is give the chapters an enticing title, so that someone seeing the downloadable (and later online) previews would get a sense of all the glorious things to come. Same is true of most of the other platforms, of which the most important for me is Barnes & Noble, whose system is very similar.
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Perhaps you can help me understand the allure of an HTML TOC. Granted, my view may be a bit skewed because currently my only e-reader is a Kobo Wifi which has no capability to follow links of any kind, but I do have e-book apps on various other electronic devices and have never been tempted to use the HTML TOC.
First, how do you actually use the HTML TOC? From my perspective, the best feature of the HTML TOC is that once you get there, you can then skip the rest of it and get on with actually reading. But then I can do that anyway using the reader UI and the toc.nxc.
After you've begun reading, how do you access the HTML TOC? Do you navigate back to wherever the TOC is, the third chapter (using the reader UI) or page 14 (using the reader UI), or do you specially bookmark the TOC in every book? It seems more convenient to me to be able to access the TOC directly from wherever I am in the book.
Second, if you include an HTML TOC for the sole purpose of giving potential buyers who are reading the preview a look at the chapters not included in the preview, what is its benefit after they have made the purchase? From my perspective this is a marketing tool that gets in the way of the product's actual use.
It seems far more logical to me to include a section in the preview (that does not appear in the purchased e-book) for "Other Chapters", or to simply add a list of chapters to the book description in the online store. Something that does its job when you need it to and goes away when it's no longer useful.
Incidentally, I went to Amazon to find a representative e-book with a preview and HTML TOC and clicked on the #1 book under "Best Books of the Month". I got this:
The Girl on the Train: A Novel
This is a good argument that at least
some HTML TOC's should not exist. At least with the toc.ncx my reader will number that mess so I can tell it to go to "17. Rachel" instead of "7. Rachel" or "13. Rachel". But insisting that an HTML TOC should appear at the beginning of all books means that things like this are inevitable.