Being a big fan of Terry Pratchett's books I always loved the little jokes when the author directly talks to the reader through the footnotes.
Being a writer myself I like that narrative style. But with eBooks there are some technical problems. I already blogged two years ago that footnotes are quite annoying on ebook-readers, cause they aren't footnotes, but endnotes and you have to scroll back and so on.
Nowadays the software has become much better, but still it is not as perfect as it should be IMHO.
The last book from Terry Pratchett I read gets around this issue in another way. Instead of using footnotes, inside the text it is put into square brackets like this:
"... Steve knew*" [* As you might guess, Steve was - of course - completely wrong at this point]
Not perfect, but a bit better in my opinion.
Now I have to decide for my own book: "Real footnotes" or the "[*]" -variant?
(The printed version will of course have the normal footnotes)
(Another solution might be to put both versions in an eBook, cause pages do not really matter in digital form. But that causes the number of pages being wrong on Amazon and Co and people might think I try to trick them.)
Being a writer myself I like that narrative style. But with eBooks there are some technical problems. I already blogged two years ago that footnotes are quite annoying on ebook-readers, cause they aren't footnotes, but endnotes and you have to scroll back and so on.
Nowadays the software has become much better, but still it is not as perfect as it should be IMHO.
The last book from Terry Pratchett I read gets around this issue in another way. Instead of using footnotes, inside the text it is put into square brackets like this:
"... Steve knew*" [* As you might guess, Steve was - of course - completely wrong at this point]
Not perfect, but a bit better in my opinion.
Now I have to decide for my own book: "Real footnotes" or the "[*]" -variant?
(The printed version will of course have the normal footnotes)
(Another solution might be to put both versions in an eBook, cause pages do not really matter in digital form. But that causes the number of pages being wrong on Amazon and Co and people might think I try to trick them.)
What would you prefer?