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I was given a Kindle e-reader a couple of years ago and, after some hesitation, I've become addicted to it, so that now I have scores and scores of books on my device. Lately I've downloaded a few books which are accompanied by notes, either by the translator or critical notes to the text.

Normally in a paper book, such notes would be available as footnotes at the bottom of the page or else at the end of the chapter, and the situation is similar in the e-books I have, but the great difference is that I never know where a chapter ends and so I read the notes when I reach them, which may be dozens of pages later, when I have almost forgotten to what they refer.

Is there an easy way to get to read notes alongside with the text?

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  • Are you talking about notes where there is a superscript link to the note itself? Books like these often allow you to jump straight to the note and then show a button to go back to the text.
    – Ian
    Commented Dec 19, 2013 at 23:17
  • No, I often didn't even know there was a note, but just found them at the end of the chapter. This happened recently with a Jagger's biography and even more so with Byron's poem "Childe Harold's pilgrimage", where at the end of the 1st canto it was possible to read references and changes which were connected with the lines read before, but something similar was also true for translator's notes in a few books. Surely there was no active link to the note in the text.
    – Paola
    Commented Dec 19, 2013 at 23:35

1 Answer 1

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The short answer is no. The only way to make notes easier to read is to find a book that has been properly formatted to have hyperlinked inline notes. If a book doesn't have that, then you could either request it from the publisher or fix it yourself.

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  • sorry if I sound dense, but how could I fix it? My Kindle is very handy for reading, but it doesn't seem to be modifiable in its settings. And as far as requesting the publisher's intervention, I guess you mean the original publisher. Amazon, through which I purchase my books, has nothing to do with it, do they?
    – Paola
    Commented Dec 21, 2013 at 9:36
  • @Paola, Ian is talking about modifying the book, not changing settings. Unless you are planning on reading the book multiple times, this is way to much work. If the book is DRM protected it is also essentially impossible. But this answer is the correct answer to your question.
    – James Jenkins
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 15:42

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