[clug] Advice request - "tablet readers" for eBooks

[Alex Satrapa]

On 09/06/2010, at 22:17, Geoff Swan <shinobi.jack at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  just loaded your ebook up on my kobo. You cant use the index function of
> the kobo to jump to individual pages. You have to manually page through the
> empty entries for A-F before you get to anything - which on a kobo is
> painful, each page taking a couple of seconds.

Seems to be a common complaint with readers that hyperlinks are not functional. I'll try Owen's ePub on iBook in the morning.

In the meantime Owen, try adding your content as separate pages between the letter-index pages, then add the letter-index pages to the XML table of contents file (NCX), and remember that you can't have the same page twice in the spine, guide or NCX. Then we get to discover the problems that some readers have with more than 30 entries in the TOC (because they have no concept of scrolling or hierarchical menus).

Someone wants to read War and Peace on a reader? Pity the fool!

War and Peace's table of contents contains 17 books, each with around 20 chapters, and weighs in at over 2000 pages on the iPad in portrait mode. Some readers will take longer to change pages as the book itself grows larger, since they wake up, parse through the ZIP to the page they want, display that page, and don't even try saving anything in memory.

Ah, the joys of programming for embedded systems :)

Alex Satrapa | web.mac.com/alexsatrapa | Ph: 0407 705 332