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I work in ebook production for an academic publisher, and I think at least part of the reason sales have flattened is technological. The current crop of ebook r

I work in ebook production for an academic publisher, and I think at least part of the reason sales have flattened is technological. The current crop of ebook readers are optimized for mass-market books, and have little or no support for complex text or layouts. My life would certainly be easier if I could rely on the Kindle to properly display math or tables, but I can't. Apple iBooks is a little better in this regard, also the newer Kobos, but not yet a big market for us. The money, for them, is in disposable genre books, so they have little incentive to do much software development (hell, some days I'd settle for just consistent behavior across product lines...)

creshal 11y ago
> My life would certainly be easier if I could rely on the Kindle to properly display math or tables, but I can't. From a pure consumer point of view, I'd already be glad if I had consistent, working footnotes in my Kindle books. Somehow, every ebook does them differently, and exactly zero make them convenient enough to bother with them. Even the one or two foot notes per page in Discworld books are a chore to handle, non-fiction books with 5+ are impossible – and I only read those for leisure. At work I'd never even consider using ebook formats. I'd honestly prefer PDFs. At least their reader ecosystem isn't quite as dysfunctional…
- Finnucane 11y ago
  A 'footnote' at the bottom of the page doesn't work when there's no bottom of a page. Our books normally have endnotes, which can be linked to a numbered callout (I've even written a little QA script to make sure all the notes are correctly linked). With traditional footnotes that have a separate number sequence for each page, that has to be resequenced and it is a chore. Some publishers are lazy about that stuff. (We have authors who insist on having both footnotes and endnotes, and I curse them).
  - creshal 11y ago
    End notes work… if the software can return back to where I came from. The Kindle can't. So I have to memorize my page number before tapping an end note. That's assuming I know the book uses end notes, which I can't without testing – some books use pop-up footnotes instead (which obscure half the screen, including the referencing text). In both cases, the Kindle loves to insist that I tap exactly the 5pt big footnote number itself (around the size of a fleck of dust) and will happily ignore any taps missing it (and just flip to the next page instead… or previous, who cares? Not Amazon). All that, of course, is assuming I use a newer one with touch screen. Otherwise, I'll have to muck around with the arrow keys.
    - Finnucane 11y ago
      "End notes work… if the software can return back to where I came from. The Kindle can't." The kindle can, if the links exist. If they don't, it's the publisher's fault.
      - creshal 11y ago
        Seems that in my 100+ books, no publisher could be bothered. Oh, well. Time to get another bookshelf…

creshal 11y ago

> My life would certainly be easier if I could rely on the Kindle to properly display math or tables, but I can't. From a pure consumer point of view, I'd already be glad if I had consistent, working footnotes in my Kindle books. Somehow, every ebook does them differently, and exactly zero make them convenient enough to bother with them. Even the one or two foot notes per page in Discworld books are a chore to handle, non-fiction books with 5+ are impossible – and I only read those for leisure. At work I'd never even consider using ebook formats. I'd honestly prefer PDFs. At least their reader ecosystem isn't quite as dysfunctional…

Finnucane 11y ago
A 'footnote' at the bottom of the page doesn't work when there's no bottom of a page. Our books normally have endnotes, which can be linked to a numbered callout (I've even written a little QA script to make sure all the notes are correctly linked). With traditional footnotes that have a separate number sequence for each page, that has to be resequenced and it is a chore. Some publishers are lazy about that stuff. (We have authors who insist on having both footnotes and endnotes, and I curse them).
- creshal 11y ago
  End notes work… if the software can return back to where I came from. The Kindle can't. So I have to memorize my page number before tapping an end note. That's assuming I know the book uses end notes, which I can't without testing – some books use pop-up footnotes instead (which obscure half the screen, including the referencing text). In both cases, the Kindle loves to insist that I tap exactly the 5pt big footnote number itself (around the size of a fleck of dust) and will happily ignore any taps missing it (and just flip to the next page instead… or previous, who cares? Not Amazon). All that, of course, is assuming I use a newer one with touch screen. Otherwise, I'll have to muck around with the arrow keys.
  - Finnucane 11y ago
    "End notes work… if the software can return back to where I came from. The Kindle can't." The kindle can, if the links exist. If they don't, it's the publisher's fault.
    - creshal 11y ago
      Seems that in my 100+ books, no publisher could be bothered. Oh, well. Time to get another bookshelf…