[bksvol-discuss] Re: new books and Daisy navigation, or lack of it.

The whole idea of pages needs to be either dropped or redefined. With Kindle books outselling hardcover print books, and the trend toward electronic books becoming the dominant form of publishing, it's a bit silly to try to cling to an obsolete model of book navigation based on dead trees.
There are certainly just as good methods of citing material in a book without page numbers. For example, just one idea I thought up over breakfast this morning, you could have links to each paragraph in a book. They would not be visible of course, unless you hit a button on your electronic book reader; then the link for that paragraph would be displayed. If you needed to cite a specific passage in a book, you could just point to that link. You could have links to any number of features in a book, even to every word if it were thought to be desirable.
Another example is that my Book Sense has menu items for paragraph and phrase navigation in the NLS and Learning Ally books that I read. They don't work right now, but certainly someone out there anticipated that these would, or at least may, be features of a future version of Daisy. So that capability is either envisioned, or already in process of development.
I'm sure that cleverer methods than the one I just thought up over breakfast this morning could be devised, or are being developed right now. It seems unlikely that people smarter than I am haven't thought about this issue.
The point is that it is silly to try to hold onto an outmoded method of finding material or moving around in a book when it is published in a format that has nothing to do with the older form of publishing. I wonder if people tried to retain whatever methods for scroll navigation there were when books started to become dominant? Probably so. 

Evan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ann Parsons" <akp@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2011 7:02 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: new books and Daisy navigation, or lack of it.



Hi all,
Here's a thought, if a page is equal to fifty lines, then could there be a line counter? At least then, no matter what type of print there is, you could go to line 300 or line 1335. There needs to be some way to quantify the text besides just via chapter headings. Maybe the problem can be solved by a line counter. The number of lines are going to be different depending on size of print, but having this as a mark-up in the DAISY code might be helpful.
What you would do is have the program count every fifty lines and insert a line number into the text. Is that doable? 

Ann P.

--
Ann K. Parsons
Portal Tutoring
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