Forget about embedding videos or animating typography to enhance ebooks: how about addressing a problem that many readers actually have? Forgetfulness, to name a common culprit. I loved David Mitchell’s latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, but I suspect I’m not the only person who had a hard time keeping the dozens of Dutch, Japanese, and English names straight. Making things even more challenging: different chapters used different names for the same person — to reflect alternating Japanese and Dutch points-of-view in the narrative.
Some books offer a simple character list at the front of the book (though there wasn’t one in the Kindle version I read). And yet ebooks can take this kind of common reader aid one step further. How about offering quick and to-the-point character summaries available throughout the book? It’d work just like the Kindle or iBook apps’ built-in dictionaries: you tap a character’s name and up pops a handy reminder. Might look something like this (imagine you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and, 70 or so pages in, forget who Colonel Fitzwilliam is):
At a tap: a "character note"
Before we reinvent books and make ‘em do things no one has ever before imagined, let’s knock off some low hanging fruit and solve reader problems that we know real people have every day.
