Reading books with a ton of pertinent notes

[Renate]

I'm reading "Shy", by Mary Rodgers.
It's pretty good, the daughter of Richard Rodgers, as in Hammerstein.
There are a ton of notes, all very pertinent.
It's almost like a running commentary.
I've almost thought that I should load up a separate reader paged to the notes.

For such occasions I have my custom reader set up to allow switching directly from the current page to a preset page. If you PgDn that page it is the new "preset" page. I call this feature "swap". You can toggle between where you're reading and the notes (or map or family tree...)

I find this easier than poking little superscripts. Also, I like to keep my filthy hands off the screen.

I use a little (custom) Bluetooth keyfob clicker to PgDn, PgUp and Menu.
I just updated the fourth button that was Sleep to be "Last Channel" as in TV.
So now with a single action I can toggle back and forth.
If the notes continue to the next page I just PgDn.
The next time I swap to the notes I'm on the latest page.

AFAIK this is not implemented on any reader?

So how do you deal with this all?
Do you avoid reading notes until the end of the chapter because they're a pain?
Does the lack of a "back link" on the notes make things more cumbersome?

(Consumer control 0c:0083 is Unix 405 is Android 229, KEYCODE_LAST_CHANNEL)

[issybird]

I greatly enjoyed Shy. I agree; you need to read the notes as they occur.

As for notes in general, it depends. First, sometimes you want to ignore them as they break up the flow and aren't especially interesting -- or interesting at all. If I do want them, I do the poke the superscript and then return to the prior page either by poking it again or poking in the middle of the page to return. After that, I can do the same "return to page" if I want and it'll do pretty much the same thing (obviously, some of the time I need to go to the next page).

When it comes to maps and family trees, if they're vital and I'm going to refer to them frequently, I usually cue the book up on a tablet or my laptop and they're too hard to view on my eink devices. If I need to look once, that's what my trusty magnifying glass is for.

[Sirtel]

I rarely read a book with lots of notes, as I prefer fiction. But when I do, it's usually no real bother to hop back and forth (I use a pen, not a finger for this). In extreme cases, I may open the book on a second screen (laptop, phone, another ereader, whatever is handy). But that is very rare.

[ownedbycats]

This book is a few thousand pages (2,500 when run through Count Pages) and some 20% of it footnotes. (And it's the first of a trilogy! Well, a planned trilogy...)

My finger was very sore from all the tapping by the time I finished it.

[Renate]

I think it's worthwhile to check the notes when you start to see if it's just 100 pages of ibid or "I couldn't fit this amusing anecdote anywhere else, so it's here."

[gmw]

Kobo has support to bounce back and forth between two locations in the book, and this is normally how I manage footnotes. Normally I only read one book at a time and this has been working for me, however...

I've recently been reading a few books at once (life's like that at the moment), including two with endnotes, and I discovered that Kobo doesn't save this page bounce thing when you leave the current read. So every time I returned I had to set up the footnotes location again. A relatively minor annoyance in the scheme of things, but definitely annoying.


P.S. I got in the habit of loading my Kobo with epub files. When I tried kepub several years ago I didn't much like it, neither the footnote nor image features seemed very smooth, but it's possible that has improved since then, I probably should try.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Renate

I think it's worthwhile to check the notes when you start to see if it's just 100 pages of ibid or "I couldn't fit this amusing anecdote anywhere else, so it's here."

Hah, the Lewisohn book was kind of a pain as some half of them were just ibids but then the other half had interesting details tucked in that made me loaf loathe to skip them over.

[fduniho]

Originally Posted by Renate

So how do you deal with this all?
Do you avoid reading notes until the end of the chapter because they're a pain?
Does the lack of a "back link" on the notes make things more cumbersome?

For books with lots of pertinent footnotes, I normally read on my Kindle Touch, which handles footnotes better than later Kindles do. When I tap a footnote, it goes directly to the footnotes section instead of showing me a pop-up footnote. This has some advantages. First, the footnote is all there. It doesn't get cut off if it is longer than a paragraph. Second, I can look up words in the dictionary while reading a footnote in the footnotes section. Third, I can quickly see which footnotes I can safely skip, such as those that just cite a text, and I can find out which footnote I will want to read next. This saves me from tapping on every footnote as I come to it. One more advantage of using the Kindle Touch is that it still has the back button, which I find more convenient than how newer Kindles currently let you go back.

[Renate]

I just finished "Shy", Mary Rodgers and enjoyed it a lot.

This morning I worked on some restructructuring of my reader to enhance the caching when swapping to/from footnotes. So now the flipping occurs without any rendering and that makes it almost instantaneous. It does improve the experience.