Electric Prayer

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new e-book, “Resurrection Is Now”, by Dom Aelred Watkin OSB. This book has long been out of print in physical form and we have had many requests for it as an e-book.

This book, rigorously reasoned but with a keen poetic sensibility, shows how death is not only an end but a beginning, and how to live life as a preparation for death and resurrection.

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We are pleased to announce the publication of a new e-book, “Reading and Reflection”.

This book contains the readings at Mass according to the official lectionary of the Catholic Church, for every day of every year. Each and every reading is accompanied by an accessible and scholarly commentary by Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB.

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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.

A new translation of the readings at Mass will come into use in England and Wales from Advent 2024. This is based on the Catholic Edition of the English Standard Version Bible. 

We plan to provide this translation just as we have been providing the Jerusalem Bible version currently in use. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales will liaise with publishers, including Universalis, to ensure the texts are available ready for the publication date. 

In Scotland the National Liturgical Commission has announced that the same version will be used. 

Ireland is remaining with the Jerusalem Bible and will probably move to the Revised New Jerusalem Bible at some time in the future.