Too many notes!

[Psymon]

Many, many years ago I helped a friend -- an English prof -- develop a website about American Transcendentalism, which includes highly-annotated versions of all their texts. Here's an example of one of the pages/sections that were done, from my own favourite author of that period, Henry David Thoreau...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu...hapter01a.html

I thought it would be so cool to come up with an ebook version of this particular text ("Walden"), but for the life of me I can't think of a practical way to do all those many, many pop-up notes (as you see throughout the text -- just click on any of them and you'll see what I mean). I think it's possible to do for iBooks (I saw an example of "pop-up notes" somewhere), but I have a feeling that it wouldn't translate very well over to Kindle.

Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions on that?

Thanks in advance!

[HarryT]

The latest Kindle PW supports pop-up notes, similar to those in iBooks.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The latest Kindle PW supports pop-up notes, similar to those in iBooks.

Oh, that's cool, and good to know -- but if I was going to try to design it for Kindle, then I have to design for "all" of them and make things backwards (and sideways) compatible, don't I? I mean, if I was going to make it and then load it up to amazon, I can't just specify that it's for "the latest PW only" or something -- they want it to work in ALL their Kindles (and I would, too, ideally).

I suppose I could transform all those zillions of popup notes into linked footnotes instead -- but what a nightmare that would be (as far as the work involved goes), and doesn't seem that it would be very practical, from a user's/reader's perspective. It's quite convenient the way that we did them up on that website, though.

[HarryT]

No, you slightly misunderstand. If you simply code a normal linked endnote, then on the PW when you tap the link it will appear as a pop-up. On older Kindles it will jump to the location of the endnote. No special coding needed.

See this thread for more information.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, you slightly misunderstand. If you simply code a normal linked endnote, then on the PW when you tap the link it will appear as a pop-up. On older Kindles it will jump to the location of the endnote. No special coding needed.

See this thread for more information.

Ah, okay, that's interesting. The only thing, though, is that for any devices that don't support that, there's just far, far too many notes in that text I'm thinking about ("Walden") to make it practical to be continually jumping up and down, back and forth between the text and the notes.

(PS. Just as an aside, I looooved Louise Brooks in the early film version of The Canary Murder Case.)

[mrmikel]

Doesn't it kind of depend how much work it is? Nothing wrong with doing what you can if it isn't going to last too long. There are programs that will bring in whole websites, like httrack. I wonder if that is the only problem, like maybe using javascript... that is how I have seen it accomplished in some of websites I've seen.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Doesn't it kind of depend how much work it is? Nothing wrong with doing what you can if it isn't going to last too long. There are programs that will bring in whole websites, like httrack. I wonder if that is the only problem, like maybe using javascript... that is how I have seen it accomplished in some of websites I've seen.

I'm not sure what you're saying -- or asking (if that's a question). That is how we did those popup notes on that aforementioned website, i.e. using javascript, of course.

[mrmikel]

Is that how the pop up notes are handled in the newer Kindle and Apple devices?

Just asking, I don't know.

[HarryT]

I've explained above how the newer Kindle handles pop-up notes.