Was it the expurgated version? The one without the gannet?
Any book with a flip book-style animation.
: looks completely blank:
: slinks away :
Yeah, that book gets DQ’d on fonts, text colors, illustrations, non-traditional (to say the least) page layouts, non-preset page sizes (example: the footnotes frequently get so extensive that they take over the page), page numbering (there’s an instance where a checkmark is put next to a particular page number), not to mention nit being paper. The scene where a particular paper book is used unconventionally in the tunnels of the house is important for that.
Only Revolutions, by the same author, can be read starting from either cover (both of which appear to be the front cover), as the “footnote” space on each page has upside-down text in it. This is what you’d be reading if you’d started from the other cover. He tells an interwoven tale of two characters, from each of their viewpoints, and the story’s interpretation can be different depending which cover you started from.
They wet their nests.
Simple black-and-whilte illustrations are no problem on the Kindle. Photographs can be done, but they don’t look too good.
Footnotes and endnotes generally work as special kinds of links. You move the cursor to them and click, and it shows the note. Then click the “back” button to go back to the text.
However, it requires the book publisher to set up the notes properly. On some early books it wasn’t done right (perhaps they didn’t know how to do it right).
That reminds me: Can the Kindle do mirrored text, like in “Jabberwocky”?
I’ve been reading all of the Sherlock Holmes stories on my Kobo (a comparable e-reader). Several of his short stories make use of maps, cyrptographic messages, or otherwise have some nice graphics which appear thusly in the body of the story:
(graphic)
It genuinely pisses me off when I’m reading it on the go or in bed, and I then whip out my blackberry to do a google image and see what the hell the secret message/drawing was in the first place!
I’m by no means an expert on the technology behind these things, but all e-readers are PDF compliant, yes? As such, they’re capable of displaying images. I have PDFs with images in them. I’ve seen them on my e-reader. They’re not “great,” but they’re acceptable, at least moreso than having to supplement my latest e-geegaw with a google search…
The last few pages of Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker are hand-written, ostensibly after the author has yanked the plug on his Remington electric typewriter.
My copy uses italics vs. regular text, which I think could be done on a Kindle.
Those Choose Your Own Adventure titles might be a bit difficult to port…
I don’t see why. If the Kindle can link to footnotes/endnotes, it can link to page choices. Choose Your Own Adventure were paper-and-ink hypertext, anyway…<a href="/page 12">If you want to do x</a>, <a href="/page 34">if you want to do y</a>.
I’m glad I’m not the only one whose mind immediately went there.
on the other hand, I’m a Kindle lover, but Kindle really fucks up some texts.
I enjoyed Here’s looking at Euclid, but not as much as I might have.
See, I read it on Kindle.
Half of the relevant equations were all shoved to the chapter appendices. The other half simply didn’t display properly on the Kindle. All of them should have properly displayed, in context, in the passage to which they were relevant. Fuck you, Kindle.
For a math book, this is pretty unacceptable.
I wonder why there is such a common misconception that the Kindle can’t do graphics?
Any pop-up book.
Good point. Of course when I read them (er, not that I ever read CYOA books as a 19 year old. at all…) I like to stick my fingers in wherever I make a decision so I can flip right back to it. Do Kindles have a back button?
This is what I came in to post as well.
Because it does picture quality images substandard and clumsily, and image contrast and improvement of the display technology is a built in generational improvement in a futureKindle 3.9 somewhere down the line. The Kindle you have is already obsolete.
Just answering some questions and clearing up some apparent misconceptions:
Kindles do photo-quality images quite well, certainly well enough for most purposes, though they are limited to B&W. Since Kindle books can be read on your computer, phone, etc., however, it is very easy to see any images in full-color and pristine quality, even if you can’t see it well enough on your Kindle. Images can be integrated into the text for things like Elvish writing in “The Lord of the Rings” or complex equations in a math textbook. [ETA: “Here’s Looking at Euclid” isn’t available on Kindle anymore, so apparently the publishers decided to remove it rather than do it right!]
Kindles can read PDF files, and just about anything you can do in a PDF can be done in a Kindle file.
Unfortunately, publishers often produce substandard e-books, especially when they are converting existing works to Kindle format. They very often include images at very low resolution. They frequently use texts produced by scanning printed editions and using optical character recognition, which produces a lot of errors, and the resulting e-texts are very frequently uncorrected.
For public domain works like the Sherlock Homes stories, Amazon has eliminated most of the shoddily produced duplications, but I think it’s still the case that most of the editions are the result of people converting Project Gutenberg texts, which are not professionally produced (though I appreciate what they do!), generally don’t rely on the best printed editions and, especially for their earlier e-books, may lack illustrations and even basic typographic features.
Fortunately, authors and readers are demanding better quality, and Amazon will happily refund your money for any Kindle book that doesn’t meet your standards. E-books as a percentage of books sold have skyrocketed recently (up to almost 10% from just over 3% in 2009!), and I think they will overtake paperbooks within 10 years, maybe within five. So more and better e-books are certainly on the way.