"Pages" without pages? That sounds brutal. Obviously, the software geeks are taking everyone on a Wild Goose Chase.
Still, Pages can't possibly be as bad as Word 2010, version 14.0. Microsoft has grown so big and so successful that its development arm has lost touch with reality. In short, there are too many coders adding lunacy to the app. MS has been trying to emulate Apple for the last 25 years. But Apple is more focused on Tablet sales. Now The Cloud has put a dangerous new wrinkle into the software business. Everyone wants to get users to share their goods online. They may talk about preserving privacy. But no one knows how often their databases are infiltrated by hackers, whether they be government snoops or offshore terrorists.
Having said all that, I'm committed to electronic publishing. What is needed is a universal meta-format. The protocol has to be flexible enough to allow for intelligent innovations in presentation. A universal text, graphic, video and audio interface would cut way down a document sizes. Universal documents could be easily accessed by any digital device running any software OS.
Many eBooks are as expensive as 1st-edition paperbacks. Whereas you can scan a page of your favorite paper book, eBooks don't allow any kind of copying, even of relatively small portions of text. There is, of course, a good reason for this. Writers don't want to end up like musicians who must do "live" concerts or exist on reputations and friendly handouts.
So what will convince readers to buy an eBook as opposed to a paper book? Organization is one good reason. Books are human memory in condensed form. They are entertainment. Yes. But they are also fountains of knowledge, if only as conversational fodder for cocktail parties. Books are brimming with ideas. They can change the language vernacular; they can change the cultural tempo. In this sense, they are milestones for an ongoing pageant.
A good eBook can be more accessible than a paper book. To read an endnote in a paperbound book, you have to flip through hundreds of pages. With an eBook, it can be just a click away. As well, eBooks can organize content in new and interesting ways.
Unfortunately, Word 14.0 seems to have gone off on its own when dealing with endnotes. Inside Word itself, endnotes appear a textbox popups, but when you export the Word document to PDF, all the endnotes become inoperable. I have a KOBO eBook that has endnotes that work properly, but I don't know how they do it. Their Footnotes (Endnotes) appear with a star character before each number. In the eBook itself, you can view the Endnotes at the very end of the document. They are arranged as they appear in the book, and you can use them as a kind of secondary index to the narrative.
The book is titled "The Golden Spruce" and it's mostly for British Columbians, since it documents the destruction of a large, venerable spruce tree with a genetic defect. It grew with golden pine needles. The eBook has only 18 Endnotes, which are more manageable than my 193. And to say the truth, I should've added more Endnotes than I did: for unusual words, for the cast list, for a full-fledged bibliography, etc.
Think about it. Some paper books have the cast list in the beginning. Until you read deeply into the narrative, the cast list is useless. Who wants to memorize 49 character names? Other cast lists are at the end. Most readers don't even know they exist until they've finished the book. Keeping characters straight can be a real problem, especially for speed-readers like myself who don't keep track of exact spellings or multiple surnames. Two characters with names that start with the same 1st-letter can be confused with each other, especially if neither appears for long stretches of the narrative.
Much more can and should be done about improving the presentation in eBooks. Otherwise, they will continue to be regarded as 2nd-class siblings of paperbound books. There need to be reasons why an eBook is preferred over hardcopy. The software geeks have been promising a paperless society for 30 years, but we seem no nearer to that goal.
Still, Pages can't possibly be as bad as Word 2010, version 14.0. Microsoft has grown so big and so successful that its development arm has lost touch with reality. In short, there are too many coders adding lunacy to the app. MS has been trying to emulate Apple for the last 25 years. But Apple is more focused on Tablet sales. Now The Cloud has put a dangerous new wrinkle into the software business. Everyone wants to get users to share their goods online. They may talk about preserving privacy. But no one knows how often their databases are infiltrated by hackers, whether they be government snoops or offshore terrorists.
Having said all that, I'm committed to electronic publishing. What is needed is a universal meta-format. The protocol has to be flexible enough to allow for intelligent innovations in presentation. A universal text, graphic, video and audio interface would cut way down a document sizes. Universal documents could be easily accessed by any digital device running any software OS.
Many eBooks are as expensive as 1st-edition paperbacks. Whereas you can scan a page of your favorite paper book, eBooks don't allow any kind of copying, even of relatively small portions of text. There is, of course, a good reason for this. Writers don't want to end up like musicians who must do "live" concerts or exist on reputations and friendly handouts.
So what will convince readers to buy an eBook as opposed to a paper book? Organization is one good reason. Books are human memory in condensed form. They are entertainment. Yes. But they are also fountains of knowledge, if only as conversational fodder for cocktail parties. Books are brimming with ideas. They can change the language vernacular; they can change the cultural tempo. In this sense, they are milestones for an ongoing pageant.
A good eBook can be more accessible than a paper book. To read an endnote in a paperbound book, you have to flip through hundreds of pages. With an eBook, it can be just a click away. As well, eBooks can organize content in new and interesting ways.
Unfortunately, Word 14.0 seems to have gone off on its own when dealing with endnotes. Inside Word itself, endnotes appear a textbox popups, but when you export the Word document to PDF, all the endnotes become inoperable. I have a KOBO eBook that has endnotes that work properly, but I don't know how they do it. Their Footnotes (Endnotes) appear with a star character before each number. In the eBook itself, you can view the Endnotes at the very end of the document. They are arranged as they appear in the book, and you can use them as a kind of secondary index to the narrative.
The book is titled "The Golden Spruce" and it's mostly for British Columbians, since it documents the destruction of a large, venerable spruce tree with a genetic defect. It grew with golden pine needles. The eBook has only 18 Endnotes, which are more manageable than my 193. And to say the truth, I should've added more Endnotes than I did: for unusual words, for the cast list, for a full-fledged bibliography, etc.
Think about it. Some paper books have the cast list in the beginning. Until you read deeply into the narrative, the cast list is useless. Who wants to memorize 49 character names? Other cast lists are at the end. Most readers don't even know they exist until they've finished the book. Keeping characters straight can be a real problem, especially for speed-readers like myself who don't keep track of exact spellings or multiple surnames. Two characters with names that start with the same 1st-letter can be confused with each other, especially if neither appears for long stretches of the narrative.
Much more can and should be done about improving the presentation in eBooks. Otherwise, they will continue to be regarded as 2nd-class siblings of paperbound books. There need to be reasons why an eBook is preferred over hardcopy. The software geeks have been promising a paperless society for 30 years, but we seem no nearer to that goal.
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