Teleread

Over on Teleread, there’s a new blog post today about ebooks being fertile for annotation. I envision this somewhat like a post littered with Wikipedia links to explain things so that the reading audience who doesn’t know what he’s talking about can go get a little primer, and the part of the audience that does know won’t have its reading flow interrupted.

I could have (and still could at any point in the future) litter The Proviso with references and annotations embedded in the ebook editions, but my question is this:

If you had an ebook reader (or if you HAVE an ebook reader), how do you think you’d like such a thing?

On the ebook front, nothing much to report except the iLiad just released a new thingymajig that’s not getting rave reviews. And the Kindle’s not coming out in the UK this year.

On the publishing front, The Mysterious They say that if you’re a midlister or a new author–or an agent specializing in such–y’all are just SOL ’cause the PTBs at major houses are tightening their belts (which means either the smaller houses will be, too or they’ll step in to take up the slack and make a mark).

Yeah. I don’t have that problem.

Oh, one more thing. As a reader, I have a suggestion for you e-publishers: Put the blurb of the book on the first page. That way I haven’t forgotten what the book is about when I open up my ebook reader and see titles and author names. I’m terribly forgetful and have no wish to dive into a book I don’t know what it’s about. Yeah, I downloaded it so it must have intrigued me but now I don’t know why. With my print books, I always go to the blurb to figure out what I want to read next, but obviously, there is no back-of-book on an ebook.

And by the way, we did put The Proviso‘s blurb in the front for that very reason.