Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
I still feel like putting links in a book is a big mistake. I suspect that Amazon feels the same way and that's why they're so hard-nosed about making authors fix them.
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Clickable links are one of the enormous advantages of ebooks over print. It's why you have hyperlinks all over the internet, linking directly to other sources.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
It's for books with hundreds of links that I fret.I have many non-fiction books with links by the hundreds and even thousands.
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Yep. Last year I digitized a history book: 1900 footnotes, 550 URLs.
As the articles above discuss, some % of links naturally die every year... even 5% dead would be 27 links. And that's just one book. Each one would require you to hunt down the article, try to find the original, make sure it's the same, make sure you don't make a introduce new errors, etc. etc.
And in many cases, like Youtube copyright takedowns, who knows if the working link you found is what the author intended.
On Link Rot
Wikipedia also lists some ways to "solve" this problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot
but even in their case, they LEAVE THE ORIGINAL LINK, then link to an archived version too. (Which in the case of Non-Fiction, is good practice + may be mandatory depending on your citation style [Chicago, MLA, etc. etc.]).
This solution would be a complete no-go with this new Amazon crackdown because... dead link!!!