I am currently reading The Mezzanine by Nicholas Baker—a great read which I would highly recommend to anyone who is a consumer, has worked in an office, or has, when alone in an elevator, pretended to walk like a windup toy into a wall. The Mezzanine is a short, dense read with multiple footnotes. I am not sure about you, but it always takes me a while to get into the flow of a novel with footnotes—mainly to figure out when to consult the footnote. If the footnote is in the middle of a sentence, do I finish the sentence then go to the footnote? Finish the paragraph or page, then move on to the footnote? After the first 25 pages or so I can get into a rhythm and transition from body copy to footnote seamlessly.
While reading the first 25 pages or so, I began to wonder—how would this reading experience be on an eReader? With the print version of The Mezzanine, I can read footnotes at my leisure. If the footnote continues onto the next page, which happens occasionally in The Mezzanine, I can read the whole footnote and flip back a page and continue reading the body copy. But how would this reading experience work on an eReader? Obviously it would depend on what eReader you have but I think this is an interesting question. I do not have an eReader, other than my iPhone, so I do not know the answer to this question? Has anyone read a book with footnotes on an eReader yet? How was it? I saw that Infinite Jest is available for the Kindle—I would love to know how that reading experience was.
I also dig “The Mezzanine.” Great book.
As for footnotes, I read “Appetite for Self-Destruction” on the Kindle iPhone app last year, and the epub creator at S&S handily linked the footnotes. So you could bounce back and forth between the endpapers and the text with a tap.
-Ryan
Awesome. Thanks for the info. But how was the reading experience? I know you are an Infinite Jest fan, would you have liked reading that on said app w/ the ability to bounce back and forth with a tap? I also wonder if you could have done that for the Kindle version, or was it iPhone specific?