# What could e-book producers do to take better advantage of the medium? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 30, 2014, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395 "2014-04-30T20:56:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/21 "2014-05-01T19:39:14Z")
I’d be happy with decent proofreading. Way too many ebook conversions are a slipshod mess. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/22 "2014-05-01T19:46:24Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > The main thing I’d like to see is a quick way to flip between footnotes, references, sidebars and end material and the place where they’re referenced in the text. Especially in books where the notes are all at the end of the chapter or book. How about a way to reorganize a book, putting footnotes together, separating them, blanking them out, removing images, or… (all options, of course) I don’t have an e-reader, so for all I know this already exists. If not, it would be a trivial programming task. Can fonts be changed in e-readers? Are there internal hyperlinks? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/23 "2014-05-01T21:00:39Z")
One thing I’d love to see would be an E&M textbook where you could switch all of the equations from MKS to Gaussian at the touch of a button. Of course, I’d also love to see a print graduate-level E&M book that was at least half-decent, so I’m not exactly holding my breath on that. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/24 "2014-05-01T21:04:30Z")
One of the unexpected things that I found when I bought a copy of my recently published book for our Nook reader (Hey, I have to be able to show it off!) is that all of the URLs among my references suddenly became hot hyperlinks. Nobody told me that would happen. I suspect most of my editors didn’t even know. Because a lot of content these days is most easily accessible (or, in some cases ONLY accessible) online, I find myself putting more and more references to websites (although I do say that such references are likely to be temporary – an awful lot of websites are only slightly less ephemeral than a telephone call). I was pleasantly surprised when, on perusing the e-book version of **Zap!** that the internet references were all in blue, and if I clicked on them I immediately found myself transported to the YouTube video or the Google Books site I’d referenced. It turned my book into an unexpected multimedia production. Now, of course, I regret all those URLs I let the editors clear out of my footnotes. They complained that they were getting too long. “Okay,” I figured, “Nobody’s going to type in a ludicrously long web address, anyway. As long as they know where I looked it up, they can use their own search engine to find it.” But, if I’d left them in, people would be able to tap into my references with a simple tap. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/25 "2014-05-01T21:31:28Z")
The problem with e-books is that they are typically converted using a one-step, half-assed process with little technical followup. There aren’t even any particularly good tools for the job. Web folks, you remember HoTMetaL, right? That’s like the \*next \*generation of e-book tool. Like DVDs, there’s no reason the controls and interface of e-books need be so shitty and frustrating - except that it’s easier use a default setup and default options and do no optimization and thus end up with the equivalent of, say, a DVD that plays the FBI warning every time you hit the menu button. (GoT S1, I am so lookin’ at you!) It’s all in the skill of the e-book builder, and since most buyer/readers just assume that’s the way it’s gotta be and few publishers will pay an extra dime for a conversion tech to fine-tune things and the tools are so bad that fine-tuning is on a par with writing, say, the entire [Disney.com](http://Disney.com) website by hand-coding… well. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/26 "2014-05-01T22:03:55Z")
**CalMeacham** , would I be correct to guess that you wrote your manuscripts in TeX? Starting natively in a format which provides proper support for things like section headers, references, and indexes is going to result in a much cleaner conversion for very little effort. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/27 "2014-05-01T22:34:51Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > **CalMeacham** , would I be correct to guess that you wrote your manuscripts in TeX? Starting natively in a format which provides proper support for things like section headers, references, and indexes is going to result in a much cleaner conversion for very little effort. I wrote my manuscripts in Word. I marked up galleys in Word. If the publisher converted it to anything after that, I don’t know. I’ve worked in LateX variants elsewhere, but definitely not for this. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2014, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/28 "2014-05-02T17:19:06Z")
Some of the passages I’ve written are associated very strongly in my mind with songs. Slipping in a hotlink to a .wav file of the particular song so the reader could listen as they read strikes me as something that might add a lot of pleasure to their reading experience. But of course, I don’t do that because I know the RIAA would be all over my ass if I did. ---
**Author:** ![Gangster\_Octopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a8b319/32.png) [@Gangster\_Octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gangster_Octopus)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2014, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/29 "2014-05-02T17:28:37Z")
Color e-ink will be a game changer when it becomes affordable. ---
**Author:** ![jayrey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/47e85d/32.png) [@jayrey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayrey)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2014, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/30 "2014-05-02T18:36:04Z")
> [@phouka](#): > > One thing I absolutely love about the Kindle is that I can double-click on any word and get a dictionary definition. I tend to read a lot of historical fiction, and there can be a lot of obscure terms - different types of fabric, archaic use of common words, scientific terms, jargon, and such. I’ve always absorbed meaning through context, but having the precise definition available at my fingertips is utterly wonderful. > > One thing I wish Kindle books were better at or did at all is the graphics. I want to be able to scale pictures. I want an easy to access Table of Contents with clearly labeled links to things like genealogical trees, maps, forewards, glossaries, and indices. I’d love if the screensaver would show the cover of the book I’m currently reading. This, exactly. Well said, **Phouka**. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2014, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395/31 "2014-05-06T17:01:37Z")
> [@Ferret\_Herder](#): > > Amazon does the ‘discounted e-book if you bought the physical one’ option on occasion, with a very limited selection of titles. Try searching on “Matchbook” in the store search bar (via web browser, dunno if Kindles have something built in to look for this) and it should pull up that option. Not in the UK. Amazon tends to bring things out in the US a lot earlier than here though, so maybe at some point. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-e-book-producers-do-to-take-better-advantage-of-the-medium/687395.md?page=1)