Electric Prayer

Like the previous post, this one describes bugs in the Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader. Amazon do not provide any way of reporting bugs, so these bugs are likely to be permanent.

Footnotes

Amazon describe a way for publishers to include a footnote in text and indicate that it is a footnote.

However, they have also decided to program the Kindle to decide that certain links within a text are to be counted as footnotes whether or not they are footnotes. A publisher is therefore likely to find that any link to a page in the book may fail to take the reader to that page, and instead present a pop-up window showing a version of the page mangled into “footnote shape”.

There is nothing whatever that a publisher can do about this. Amazon’s programming is completely secret and undocumented and there is no way of knowing what is making the Kindle decide that a page is a footnote; nor of telling it that a page is not a footnote. Or perhaps there is a way but Amazon are keeping it a secret.

To make things even more entertaining, Amazon provide no way for a publisher to try out any conceivable method of “footnote avoidance”. The only way to see what an e-book will look like when published is to publish it and then buy a copy.

So we are stuck, and you have the inconvenience of guerrilla footnotes.

• The problem affects links which point to a page later in the book.
• …but not all of them.
• Pages (and links) which look identical on the screen can suffer opposite fates. Tapping one of the links will pop up a footnote, while tapping a link on another page that looks just like it will jump, correctly, to the page it is pointing to.

The cure is this. If you tap on a link, and the page you asked for pops up as a footnote instead of a page, the Kindle will also show a button marked “Open footnote”. Press that button.