Quote:
Originally Posted by ElMiko
Perhaps this is a reader/writer conflict... For my part, as a reader, I really dislike footnotes that have been inserted into the middle of the text. Hyperlinking, in my view, is the greatest thing to happen to footnotes since, well, footnotes. if you link to and from the the footnotes (i.e. from the body text to the footnote, and from the footnote back to the paragraph or line being footnoted), navigating footnote-heavy books is a breeze. Granted, as has been said already, this is no longer technically a footnote (... and neither is inserting it the footnote text in the middle of a body paragraph), but really what matters is that it's the most efficient way to provide readers with extended parenthetical information. If you believe that the footnote is central (ie, not parenthethical) to the sentence (enough to be awkwardly integrated into the body text), then it shouldn't have been a footnote to begin with.
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I completely agree. I'm
OK with putting them at the end of chapters, but even then, once the reader gets to the end of a chapter they might have to page through several footnotes (that they may have already read) before getting to the next chapter. That can be annoying (even if you provide a link to skip over them). The only advantage I see to putting them at the end of the chapters instead of the end of the book is for performance reasons: the ePub renderer has to load another file entirely if the foot/end-notes are physically in a different (x)html file. They're already loaded up/parsed if they're at the end of the very same (x)html file.
But I say link, links, links. Get 'em (the notes)
out for the normal flow of text and leave it up to the reader to decide if they're going to make the effort to follow them or not. The ones who are interested will be more than happy to click/tap a link to travel there and back, and the ones who
aren't interested won't be annoyed at having the normal flow of text continually interrupted with ancillary/anectdotal asides.
But everybody's gotta do what they gotta do ... these are just opinions after all.
