Footnotes on Kindle Books

[Thamisgith]

First up, I'm new here - so hello everyone. Greetings from Scotland.

I am currently using my original Kindle 2.0 (my son has absconded with the Kindle 3/Keyboard). I absolutely love reading on the Kindle and actually prefer it to "real" books.

The one exception being books which use a lot of footnotes. Terry Pratchett would be a good example of an author who uses this device.

I find that the act of moving the cursor to the footnote number, clicking, being taken to a separate page, moving the cursor back, clicking, being returned to the original text, which for some reason has now been slightly re-paginated, is intrusive and distracting.

Am I the only one?

Is there another, better, way to do this?

[pdurrant]

Unfortunately, this is the best that can be done at present.

I haven't checked, but I'm hopeful that the new KF8 format that Amazon are releasing shortly will give book creators some way to define a pop-up text for a link, that appears on the same page as the original. Or else that it allows footnotes to be rendered on the same page without a popup.

But these are currently only hopes. I don't know if KF8 will have such a feature.

[Thamisgith]

Oh well - I'll just have to wait and see if it gets better then.

Having a pop up appear on the same page sounds like a good idea. It would definitely be better than the current arrangement.

Thankfully, it's only a problem with a relatively small percentage of books.

[Thamisgith]

Originally Posted by PhillipA82

Enjoy the Forum Thamisgith

Thanks for the welcome Phillip. I'm certainly enjoying it thus far.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Thamisgith

...
I find that the act of moving the cursor to the footnote number, clicking, being taken to a separate page, moving the cursor back, clicking, being returned to the original text, ...
Is there another, better, way to do this?

Actually, on the Kindle it's slightly easier than you describe. True, you have to navigate the cursor to the footnote jumber and click to get to the footnote, but once there and done reading it you only have to press the "Back" button to return to the main text. There is no need the move the cursor to some "return to text" link.

[Thamisgith]

Originally Posted by dwig

Actually, on the Kindle it's slightly easier than you describe. True, you have to navigate the cursor to the footnote jumber and click to get to the footnote, but once there and done reading it you only have to press the "Back" button to return to the main text. There is no need the move the cursor to some "return to text" link.

Thanks dwig - that will certainly help a little.

[pidgeon92]

If I were you, I'd look into getting a Kindle Touch when they are available.

[Thamisgith]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

If I were you, I'd look into getting a Kindle Touch when they are available.

I'm in the UK, so I doubt if they'll be available here for a while. Still, at least I'll have the chance to get some user feedback before buying.

I just got my son the new entry level Kindle. It certainly looks good to me. Nice screen, fast page turns etc.

[valex]

Originally Posted by Thamisgith

Is there another, better, way to do this?

There are at least two ways. Unfortunately both require some work because native Kindle software does not support book-like footnotes. The first way is to install Coolreader (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=148850). Then you would need to convert your books to a format which is supported by Coolreader (fb2, epub, etc) using Calibre for instance (or find them in those formats). I did not try it on Kindle but I do use Coolreader on my Android phone. See its homepage for some screenshots http://coolreader.org/e-index.htm

The second way is to use one of the few fb2 to pdf converters which create pdf files formatted to fit Kindle's screen exactly. That way you would have near printed book quality (hyphenation, footnotes, proper professional typographical formatting, etc), but you would lose ability to change the font of the book on the fly since pdf format does not allow that. You can re-create the pdf with different font settings of course. In order to use this method, again, the conversion is needed since only books in fb2 format are supported. Unfortunately *-to-fb2 converter in Calibre does not support footnotes fully but there is a script that corrects that. Here is a couple of examples (ignore the Russian) http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewt...=665733#665733, http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewt...=657911#657911

I personally use the second method but it is much more involved since the converters need to be configured via text files and the process is somewhat sensitive to formatting errors in the fb2 files. The good thing is that they are actively developed and bugs get fixed quickly.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I haven't checked, but I'm hopeful that the new KF8 format that Amazon are releasing shortly will give book creators some way to define a pop-up text for a link, that appears on the same page as the original.

You don't need KF8 for that; my old Cybook Gen3 did it that way with footnotes in original Mobi files back in 2007. I know because I once opened a bug report about it (when the pop-up window was too large, it crashed the Gen3).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Thamisgith

First up, I'm new here - so hello everyone. Greetings from Scotland.

I am currently using my original Kindle 2.0 (my son has absconded with the Kindle 3/Keyboard). I absolutely love reading on the Kindle and actually prefer it to "real" books.

The one exception being books which use a lot of footnotes. Terry Pratchett would be a good example of an author who uses this device.

I find that the act of moving the cursor to the footnote number, clicking, being taken to a separate page, moving the cursor back, clicking, being returned to the original text, which for some reason has now been slightly re-paginated, is intrusive and distracting.

Am I the only one?

Is there another, better, way to do this?

It's a limitation of Mobipocket. When you jump back to the page you were originally on, it might not render correctly as it doesn't render the tags on the previous page. Mobipocket is not all that good going backwards.

[PiVi1962]

Actually, there is a third way to handle footnotes in a text: writing them down directly in the text, like an "in text" note.

If we put ourselves in a borderline scenario for a footnote in a published book on paper, than this could be the case:

----------- beginning of example

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate (1)

(1) Foootnote text.

----------- page break ---------

velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

----------- end of example

In other words, it is accepted that a footnote follows immediately the text to wich it refers, that the footnote can be in whatever point of the sentence itself, and that the reader may have to turn at least one page (more if the footnote is long more than one page) to continue reading the main text.

Well, it is possible to reproduce exactly the same thing in an ebook:

----------- beginning of example (2)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate (1)

(1) Foootnote text.

velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

----------- end of example (2)

The page break will occur in different parts of the text depending on the character size.
If we really desire to start a new page with "velit", we can insert a pagebreak right at the end of the footnote.