I’d be happy with decent proofreading. Way too many ebook conversions are a slipshod mess.
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?
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.
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.
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 website by hand-coding… well.
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.
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.
Color e-ink will be a game changer when it becomes affordable.
This, exactly. Well said, Phouka.
Not in the UK. Amazon tends to bring things out in the US a lot earlier than here though, so maybe at some point.