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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe once digital books and/or their interfaces stop being made of shit the tables will turn.

Every damn one of them has some inane lock-down that any student you ask will run up against, but has no conceivable purpose. And then there's the TOC at the beginning - less than 1/4 of the ones I've encountered even link to the pages they reference, and all non-linking ones I've encountered are incorrect because PDF pages are != book pages (they include the cover). Far far less likely for the index or glossary to be linked (though then there's searching).

They're not selling because publishers are doing squat to make them worth buying. Or even existing beyond being a faster way to search.

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It would be pretty powerful if online textbooks linked together like wikipedia. It wouldn't be too hard for a online textbook company to create a script to find instances of words from their index and link them together. If I could mouse over an important vocab word and have other relevant pages pop up, then online textbooks could be seen as more powerful than paper, rather than as an alternative.

Makes me think about why online dictionaries are so powerful compared too flipping through paper dictionaries.

Personally, i tried to buy online versions of my textbooks, but they required me to download their own client to view the textbooks, which didn't work in ubuntu(I wasn't being stubborn about switching to windows, my textbooks were for programming classes so I definitely needed to stay in my programming environment). I can understand not needing to cater to the small niche of people in linux, but a web based app to view the textbooks through the browser would have been much more pleasant for everyone of any OS.

As to the download-their-own-inevitably-crappy-client problem, there's a solution for multiple OSes: Java. A couple have used Java that I've seen, but they're always shockingly poorly implemented and slow. Java can be fast, it just takes smart developers.

Though now that Oracle has it, who knows where it's going to be in a few years.

I want to like ebooks and the readers, and I want them to succeed. But it seems anyone with the ability to push out anything with copyrighted content is going about it ass-backwards, and the free/open crowds aren't usually a whole lot better because they're taking cues from the crap that publishers release.

Take a look at the Aldiko reader for Android.

Menu -> Contents gives you a menu of sections. It also gives you search, bookmarks, etc. Another amazingly useful feature is that it turns your phone's volume control into next/prev page buttons.

Give me an Android tablet and I'll be in heaven (at least, for the few titles that come in ePub format).

Shall look into it, but I feel I must point out:

"menu of sections" implies the producer of the ebook did so. Many textbook-ebooks I've encountered are glorified scans of finished books, not anything built from the original source file (frequently PDF already, or TeX, or etc.)

ebooks for reading are usually better, but textbooks seem to come from a special circle of hell.

I'm using Aldiko for O'Reilly books, which you read similarly to textbooks ("Javascript: the good parts" currently.) Not novels.

I'll grant you that most publishers are far more backwards than O'Reilly, however. If you are stuck with ebooks in the pdfAIL format, there isn't a lot you can do.

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