David A. Desrosiers wrote:
You can't translate a book into something read in a web browser, and retain the same functionality. The whole point of a scrollbar is to remove that constraint.
Yeay! Something I've been saying for years. The "e" in ebook gives us opportunities that don't exist in print, so let's use them.
Though I agree, unnessarily-long webpages (scrolling down for hundreds of pages) are a pain, but the alternative is much more painful.
Reading a book with hundreds of pages is painful. I don't see why scrolling is any more painful than turning pages. (The Mobipocket reader for Palm also has an auto scroll option which just scrolls the text slowly by, which could be a nice feature in browsers.) One advantage of print is the ease of bookmarking a spot -- something that can't be done easily on most ebooks, although I'm working on a simple HTML solution. I also now provide a single HTML file version and a multi-page version of my ebooks. Usually the multi-page version splits the work into chapters (or whatever is the major division for the work). The multi-page version was mainly intended to make online reading easier -- there's less to download for each chapter. It also means that Google is more likely to index the content -- they have, I think, a 100k limit per file. But most browsers can easily accomodate the complete, single-file version of the average work, up to a MB or so. Something like Don Quixote is a bit more of a problem as a single file, being large in text size and also carrying many illustrations, making the total download many megabytes. Something that large really needs to be split. Steve -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, Adelaide University Library ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 5190 Fax: +61 8 8303 4369 Email: stephen.thomas@adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/