Hypertext anyone? (Kindle disappointments)

Just before Christmas, I bought a Kindle device (the one with free 3G as well as WiFi). There are many good things about it, not least the fact that thanks to its capacity I can slip far more books into my jacket pocket for a train journey than I could previously carry in a large suitcase.

What is proving increasingly disappointing is the lack of internal links in many of the books available. You might expect that this would only apply to very cheap or free Kindle versions of out-of-copyright texts. But no, publishers are selling brand-new Kindle versions of their books with not a link in sight.

The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media is a very interesting book by Richard Coyne published by MIT Press. Richard crosses the boundaries between pervasive media, design, architecture and many other fields, so Vitruvius, equal temperament, clocks, and Henri Lefebvre all make their appearance in a fascinating argument sustained over 240 pages.

Enjoying reading the hardback edition from my university’s library I thought I would buy the Kindle edition from Amazon. There are no hyperlinks between the endnote numbers in the text and the notes at the end. This makes the Kindle book far less useful than the paper version, especially given that there are forty-five pages of endnotes.

This is not really acceptable. Amazon have offered to refund my money and I shall take up their offer. They say:

‘Kindle supports titles with linked footnotes. Unfortunately there are some titles in our catalogue, including The Tuning of Place, where this functionality is not active due to the technical nature of the underlying file.’

It seems to me that a major publisher like MIT Press has no business producing a semi-functional electronic book. The T in MIT stands for Technology, I believe...