Trying to find an innovative substitute for footnotes

[Rufustank]

We've published a series of educational books for Chinese learners and we need a new method to introduce new vocabulary. It's a bit complicated and I need some ideas on how to do it better! This is the situation.

• The book is written in Chinese but it's for people who are learning Chinese.
• Throughout the book, we introduce new Characters and words which the learner does not know.
• At each occurrence of a new word, a numbered footnote is there to indicate it is a new word and provides a hyperlink to the glossary with the pronunciation and definition.

The Problem

New words and characters are repeated throughout the book. Therefore, the footnote appears every time the word does. The footnotes break up the flow of reading especially in sentences and paragraphs that use many of the new words. I want to come up with some alternative to the footnotes, but what?

One idea I've considered is a footnote at the first occurrence but some other non-intrusive indicator afterwards to indicate it's a vocab word. We want the new method to be used on all devices so we can't use color-code (which may not show up on black and white readers) and we can't use underlining because that is already used to denote proper nouns.

Any ideas please! Here is a sample of our epub so you can get an idea of what we're doing. Thanks!

liushi_niande_meng_4.3_High_Res_Sample.epub

[Jellby]

overline, border, dotted underline, grey background... or even nothing. If you explain at the beginning that new words are linked to the note, the user can try to follow the link even if there is no visual indication that it is indeed a link.

[Froide]

How about emulating SparkNotes' Vocabulary Novels (such as this one)?

[DomesticExtremis]

Originally Posted by Jellby

overline, border, dotted underline, grey background... or even nothing. If you explain at the beginning that new words are linked to the note, the user can try to follow the link even if there is no visual indication that it is indeed a link.

Dashed or dotted border around the character(s)
or grey background behind would be my choice.

Also it avoids using tiny subscripts for the links
which can be difficult to activate on a smaller touch
screen.

[mrmikel]

If the reader lacks a back button that takes you back to wherever you were before you jumped, then it is a problem which is hard to reasonably address. It has been discussed before with no consensus that did not involve multiple places to return to.

Depends on what kind of machines your readers have.

[odedta]

Originally Posted by DomesticExtremis

Dashed or dotted border around the character(s)
or grey background behind would be my choice.

Also it avoids using tiny subscripts for the links
which can be difficult to activate on a smaller touch
screen.

+1

cool book btw

[Rufustank]

Thanks guys, these are all great ideas!