WLP: Stop With The E-Footnotes Already!
January 26, 2012 in Books & Reviews
Picture it, you’re reading a funny book on your e-Reader and all the sudden this little 1 shows up next to a sentence. So you click it, giggle and then suddenly you are without a map and lost. What the hell page was I on before I clicked that 1? See, on my e-Reader, these footnotes take you to god knows where, it sure isn’t the end of the page you were on! After much panic, you find the damn page only to be confronted with the next sentence ending in a 2. Son of a b!
By the fifth chapter you’ve seen 85 separate numbers and gotten lost or thrown out of the story trying to go back to wherever the hell you were. That’s also about the point where you give up, you stop clicking those damn little numbers. Okay, so I gave up at 10 but you get the idea.
I’m WLP and I HATE funny footnotes in e-Books. HATE.
In regular, in my hand books. Fine. I am all for the funny footnotes, or hell any footnote because I can just read them on the page or flip said page. But with my e-Books, please write a sentence then (BRACKET THE FUNNY) it makes it so much easier to read the book and doesn’t make you click happy.
By the end of the book, I’d have probably clicked 400 times and been thrown out of the story if I kept clicking.
So for the love of my finger pads, stop!!
I got a ton of complaints about how the footnotes were handles in the Amanda eBooks. There should be a pop-up component. So when you click the number, the footnote pops up and then you can just ‘X’ out of it and continue reading. Sigh.
Exactly, with Amanda I read in trade so I was fine. But I’m noticing more and more funny footnotes and ignoring them because I hate the 4000 extra clicks. I don’t get why when they format the e-version, they don’t just bracket and italic the comment.
I was going to mention how much I loved the footnotes in the Amanda books (I also have them in trade), but yeah, I can see where the fun would be lost if they were a pain in the ass to get to and out of.
Yup, the piss me off to no end too. Terry Pratchett does funny as hell footnotes but I don’t read them in the ebooks because they’re done horribly. I swear, the first ebook format/reader combo to handle footnotes well gets my undying loyalty.
I actually just started a book where the footnotes are actually in the right place! ON THE SAME EBOOK PAGE. Huzzah
This is a really timely post for me (so thanks, Nat!). I’m working on a piece that has some foreign language components and I was debating footnotes with translations. In the end I decided since the point of view characters don’t understand what the people are saying (just the tone) that I can leave them without the footnotes.
Dear god, don’t do it! If you have to translate, brackets are your best friend. Or ffs make it on the same page!
Ultimately it probably wouldn’t be my call, but I’ll make some noise if push comes to shove
I read one with footnotes the same day I posted this and it was fantastically formatted. I guess it all depends.
Ha, I was going to say, the first thing I thought of was Mark’s Amanda books. I read them in paperback, so I never had that problem, but I can imagine it would be a PITA in ebook form.
<3,
-J
You’d miss some of the best parts of the books if you had to skip Mark’s