Kindle for iOS 5.13.1

[tomsem]

- You can search for notes and highlights
- It probably showed up in an earlier update, but app has pop up footnotes now (at least for books with 'advanced typography' - have not found one without AT so as to check this). It does not seem to work with Personal Docs.

Pop up footnotes will be great. The publisher/author will have to create them correctly though. I never liked the link that took you to the footnotes page, then you had to return to where you were reading. Popup is much better. The last few books I read with footnotes/endnotes placed them at the end of each chapter, but they didn't format them as footnotes/endnotes so they were treated as the last part of the chapters. No way to link to them. Lazy publisher I guess.

With printed books, I always much preferred footnotes at the bottom of the page which referenced them over endnotes which are all located at the end of each chapter/section or at the end of the book. In graduate school I hated having to hold my place in a book and flip to the back to read the endnotes. So when I wrote my thesis I demanded the ability to use footnotes, which was a royal PITA to do in the 1980s with MS Word. The Thesis Style Approver, or whatever nonsense title she had, basically a glorified librarian at the university library, approved my formatting. I printed the thesis on the official paper and submitted it. I was very proud of the look it had. But then the Thesis Style Approver changed her frigging mind and rejected it. I had to reformat the thesis and use endnotes instead. Arrrrgh!!! What a waste of time. "What a byotch!" Those were the words of my thesis committee chairwoman, not mine.

[tomsem]

I think Amazon's implementation of popup footnotes involves heuristics and is not too sensitive to how they were encoded (ePub 3 has specific attributes you're supposed to include). So in theory, it can improve even if the ebook itself does not change. But it is not perfect: I have a book of chess problems, the link to the solution invokes a popup but it only shows the text of the back-link, not the solution text. So I still have to jump to where the footnote is and navigate back with the back-link.

A typical convention is to provide a back-link with the footnote itself that takes you back to the reference. But with some reading systems, this triggers re-pagination, placing the reference at the start of the page when originally it was somewhere else. Some reading systems have a Back button that takes you back without re-pagination, and that works even if there is no back-link. But nothing is better than bringing it up in place.

I'm still curious as to whether this is one of the 'enhanced typography' features. At least on Kindle it pre-dated 'enhanced typography', but it didn't work with all books. I'll be trying stuff to see...

I've not yet encountered the popup window for footnotes. But it seems to me that for the popup to be good it should render the whole text of the footnote in a scroll-able popup window superimposed over the book page window. They really wouldn't need a link to return to where you were reading if they did it right. They would only need to allow the popup to close when you touched the screen outside of the popup box boundary. This method would mean you never left the book page or position on the page. But we are talking about Amazon here, so I suspect they will do their best to muck it up!

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I've not yet encountered the popup window for footnotes. But it seems to me that for the popup to be good it should render the whole text of the footnote in a scroll-able popup window superimposed over the book page window. They really wouldn't need a link to return to where you were reading if they did it right. They would only need to allow the popup to close when you touched the screen outside of the popup box boundary. This method would mean you never left the book page or position on the page. But we are talking about Amazon here, so I suspect they will do their best to muck it up!

My torture test for footnotes is Infinite Jest. It has multi-page footnotes, and footnotes with footnotes, and they are all essential to read.

If the footnote is relatively short and the reference is on upper 2/3 of the screen, it will display in a box at the bottom of the current page. Else it will go full-page and display up to a full page (at current font/margin/line spacing settings), but does not scroll, so it will truncate longer footnotes and you have to tap the Go To Footnotes link to read the rest. But that is not necessary 95% of the time (of course it depends on the book and your Tt settings). Once you Go there, there is a little arrow next to the start of the footnote that you can tap on to go back (I think this works even if there is no back-link, but would have to find a book formatted without back-links on each footnote). And Page Flip knows where the previous location was if you turn the page, after which the arrow is gone.

Overall, it seems pretty reasonable, though scrolling in the pop up would be a nice enhancement, especially once it has gone full-screen. One still might want to Go To Footnotes (to read several at once) but then it would be more optional.

I haven't used other reading apps enough to see if any of them support pop up footnotes, and how. Pretty sure iBooks does but I don't happen to have examples to throw at it.

[tomsem]

So it seems only books with 'enhanced typography' have pop up footnotes. On Kindle they work on books without ET as well. The latter footnotes scroll!