problem with footnotes

[jemkeith]

I have a problem with footnotes. This has happened in two different discworld books. If I tap on a foot note link, it takes me to the foot note. When I tap on the link at the start footnote to return to my previous location, it returns me, but after that when I try to go to the next page, it sends me to the beginning of the book.
These books have no chapters so it very well may be sending me to the beginning of the chapter I'm in and it just so happens in this case is the beginning of the book.

[Faterson]

I would say, this should be a problem with the structure of the two particular e-books. The lack of chapters, too, suggests this might be the case. I've read quite a few heavily footnoted books in Marvin, and haven't noticed the behaviour you describe.

As a workaround, I would suggest, after you read the footnote, to use Marvin's "Tap for last position" link at the left bottom of the screen to return from the footnotes section to the main text. This should allow you to continue reading the book normally.

[kguil]

@jemkeith - it could be that the footnote link is pointing to the wrong place in the book. If you send me an email at support@marvinapp.com, I'll be more than happy to help investigate this problem.

One other thing you can do is when going back from the footnote to the text, instead of tapping the footnote link (that may be bad), tap the "go back to last position" button at the bottom left of the page.

[jemkeith]

Originally Posted by Faterson

I would say, this should be a problem with the structure of the two particular e-books. The lack of chapters, too, suggests this might be the case. I've read quite a few heavily footnoted books in Marvin, and haven't noticed the behaviour you describe.

As a workaround, I would suggest, after you read the footnote, to use Marvin's "Tap for last position" link at the left bottom of the screen to return from the footnotes section to the main text. This should allow you to continue reading the book normally.

Actually Terry Pratchett doesn't use chapters in his Discworld books. The books work fine in Calibre and in iBooks. The footnotes are marked by an *. I just discovered that if I search for an * in Marvin, it shows the text where the * occurs, but won't go to that spot in the book. It just goes to the beginning of the book.

[jemkeith]

What the heck?! I haven't used Marvin for a couple of weeks because of the issue. I got mad and started reading on my kindle and just forgot about it. I opened it today, saw that my book was back at the beginning and decided to post about it.
I tried to reproduce the bug just now and can't. Oh well.
That's some service for you! Fixing the bugs before someone can even report them!

[jemkeith]

On a related note, I just discovered that if I search for an * in Marvin, it shows the text where the * occurs, but won't go to that spot in the book. It just goes to the beginning of the book.
Would this be a bug or is an * a wild card of sorts in the search?

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by jemkeith

Actually Terry Pratchett doesn't use chapters in his Discworld books.

I would say, that is a big design mistake. (I e-publish, too.) Having an active Table of Contents is among the first prerequisites of a well-made e-book. (You can try switching to "Sections list" in Marvin for these particular books that lack explicit chapters.)

Originally Posted by jemkeith

The footnotes are marked by an *.

That is not the ideal solution, either, especially not in electronic books. It's always better to go for 100% clarity, avoiding ambiguity as much as possible. For example, if footnotes are numbered, it's easier to refer to them in conversations with readers who may not possess the same edition you have.

Generally, I find that many (most?) e-books are very badly formatted, including those commercially sold by Amazon and other retailers. Everything points to Terry Pratchett's Discworld books belonging to the bad lot. It happens to the finest writers -- I read that Winston Churchill's e-books (and he's a Nobel Prize winner for literature!) as sold in the Kindle format contain prodigious amounts of typos on almost every page... We're really only in the earliest stages of the e-book era these days.

[jemkeith]

Pratchett doesn't use chapters in the paper books either. The ebook does have a table on contents, there's just nothing for it to link to.
I had to tweak his books for the footnotes, just to make * bigger. Some of his have numbered notes but most have periods.
I do agree that theres a lot of books that don't translate well to the ebook format, or the publishers don't take enough time to polish them. They're just trying to get them out to make money.

[kguil]

@jemkeith - could you send me an email about this? support@marvinapp.com

[jemkeith]

I did send one about searching for the *, but I didn't about it jumping to the front of the book because I couldn't reproduce the error.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by jemkeith

Pratchett doesn't use chapters in the paper books either.

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.)

[jemkeith]

The kindle paper white opens a overlay for the footnote. That's pretty nice.

[Faterson]

Yes, that's great! Especially for brief footnotes. Even the online Wikipedia has started to offer this lately: if you tap the footnote link on a Wikipedia page the first time, you get a "bubble overlay" containing the text of the footnote. If you tap the same footnote link a second time, you are then actually transferred to the footnotes section on that Wikipedia page. It would be wonderful if Marvin treated footnotes in the same way Wikipedia does it now.

Offering only the overlay wouldn't be a good solution -- some scholarly books contain footnotes where a single footnote may be of several screens' length (!), so that displaying such a footnote in a pop-up bubble would be inconvenient. Besides, you wouldn't be able to perform standard operations with the text of the footnote in a pop-up bubble, such as highlighting and annotating it, etc.

[kguil]

@jemkeith - Kindle manages to do this because of the way footnotes are encoded into their file format (that's different than EPUB 2.0). There are extensions that allow for footnotes opening in popups but AFAIK they're EPUB 3.0 features and must be supported by the book *and* the reader. From the reader end, I'm planning support for these popup footnotes but, again, they must be supported by the EPUB book too.

In the EPUB you have, footnotes are probably just links to a different part of the book so this won't be (practically) possible to do in Marvin alone.