Kindle Word Help feature (what's that going to do?)

[Richard]

I notice the new Kindle Voyager has a 'word help' feature where you touch a word in the book and it looks it up in a dictionary or in Wikipedia. Setting aside concerns about treating Wikipedia as The Truth, I wonder if they'll let authors manipulate how this feature works? As I publish books with an illustrated glossary in the back (against nearly all advice) it would be nice to tie the feature to that, but I doubt they have made it flexible enough. The Voyager's not available over here, has anyone tried this out?

[G.G.]

I don't know about kindle (if it would work with them) but I know you can link to the definition in office word. Smashwords makes you use that feature for linking chapters to content and vice versa . You coul do it for your glossary too.

[[deleted user]]

I've had my Kindle Fire HD for more than a year now and it lets you link to definitions by touching the word. You can also change the fonts, bookmark, and make notes with reference to a particular word or phrase. It's how I edit my writing. It doesn't link to Wikipedia, though.

[K.]

That would be helpful for fantasy languages IF you can link it to your own dictionary.

[Christina]

I think that's always been a feature. I have a Kindle that is at least three years old and it has the ability to look up words. I have never tried it, but I'm guessing the wiki feature is supposed to be for words that aren't in the dictionary, so maybe make a wiki page about your book?

[Richard]

The blurb suggests it picks up factual articles about items mentioned in the book, maybe more use for non-fiction.

I do use the hyperlink feature for the glossary, but I don't link from the body of the story as all those underlines would be distracting. But, that's why I stopped using Smashwords, because their implementation of it doesn't work properly with versions of Word past 2007.

[Micah]

I just got a Voyage and I believe the word lookup function is tied to dictionaries that come with the Voyage. You can change which default dictionary you want but I'm not aware of any way to tie that to a book-specific file.

I've been trying to figure out how authors can enable the X-Ray feature, which looks more useful (allowing you to look up every instance of a character name, and I think maybe notes about different characters and whatnot)...Only I've concluded that this is a feature Amazon controls, not the author. As in, your sales need to be at a certain level for them to turn that feature on.

But I haven't actually found definitive proof of that. Everything online I found about activating it is about how a reader can access it on books that have X-Ray, not how an author can switch it on or fill out the metadata.

[Richard]

It's frustrating, isn't it? In an ideal world, I'd write my books in hypertext form, where the normal view of the page would be straight text but terms would turn into links on hover. I even know how to code that in HTML, but there's no way to make an ebook work that way.

[Micah]

Which is even more frustrating since eReaders are actually nothing more than specialized web browsers and theoretically could work that way.